The Smart Card

Abstract

A chip embedded in a piece of plastic now pays for groceries, opens doors and identifies every mobile phone on a network. Its origins are disputed. The former rocket engineer Helmut Gröttrup filed a West German patent in February 1967 for an identification key containing a semiconductor circuit and, with Jürgen Dethloff, followed with patents from 1968; the Japanese inventor Kunitaka Arimura filed in 1970; the Frenchman Roland Moreno patented a secure memory chip in 1974, and Honeywell Bull put a microprocessor on a card in 1977. France made the cards a mass product from 1983, Paderborn became a centre of German card production, and the Munich firm Giesecke+Devrient delivered the first SIM cards in 1991.

Rockets, then Banking

Helmut Gröttrup was born in Cologne on 12 February 1916, studied physics at the Technische Hochschule Berlin from 1935 to 1939 and joined Wernher von Braun’s rocket team at Peenemünde, where he rose to deputy head of the electrical department of the A4 (V2) project. In April 1945 he fled west to the American troops, but by September he was working for the Soviet occupiers at the rocket institute RABE in Bleicherode, near the Mittelwerk in Nordhausen where concentration-camp prisoners had built the A4, and in 1946 he became general director of the Zentralwerke there. On the morning of 22 October 1946 he was among some 5,000 German scientists and engineers deported with their families to the Soviet Union, where they worked on rockets near Moscow and later in western Russia, well housed but isolated and never told what became of their work.

Allowed to leave in November 1953, the Gröttrups moved to West Germany. He worked for the electronics firm Lorenz in Pforzheim, which became part of Standard Elektrik Lorenz in 1958, and from January 1959 ran the Pforzheim Produktograph works, which made systems for recording factory data and were taken over by Siemens in 1960. In 1965 he went into business on his own and, with the Hamburg engineer Jürgen Dethloff, founded the Datentechnische Gesellschaft (DATEGE) in Munich.

The Identification Switch

Gröttrup’s patent applications of the mid-1960s concerned an “identification switch”: a key (the Identifikand) inserted into a reader (the Identifikator) that would then release goods or start a petrol pump. Application 1,574,074, filed on 6 February 1967, described a key containing a “control circuit built as a monolithic semiconductor block,” an integrated circuit that communicated with the reader, so that the key could not be forged. None of these early applications was granted.

On 13 September 1968 the inventions were filed together in Vienna, by a Munich company behind which stood Gröttrup and Dethloff; the Austrian office granted patent 287,366 for an “identification switch” on 25 January 1971, naming no inventor. A shortened application filed jointly in Munich on 10 September 1969, and in the following years in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, named both men; the German patent, number 1,945,777, was granted only on 1 April 1982, after Gröttrup’s death. The German Patent Office now celebrates it as the origin of the chip card, and Deutsche Post marked “50 years of the chip card” with a stamp in September 2019. The HNF objects that the patent describes a key, not a plastic card. Independently, Kunitaka Arimura of the Arimura Technology Institute in Japan filed a patent for a plastic card with an integrated circuit in March 1970.

The partners separated. In June 1970 the banknote printer Giesecke & Devrient took over DATEGE and refounded it as the Gesellschaft für Automation und Organisation (GAO), with Gröttrup as managing director. GAO built cash dispensers, change machines and machine-readable banknotes; its ISS 300 banknote-processing machine sold 2,100 units around the world (see The ATM). Gröttrup left at the end of 1980 and died in Munich on 5 July 1981. Dethloff patented a chip card of his own in 1976–77, which added a stored secret for identifying the user.

The French Card

Roland Moreno, born in Cairo in 1945, filed his first patent in Paris on 25 March 1974: a signet ring holding a memory chip, modelled on the seal rings of European nobility. In 1975 he simplified it to a plastic card with an embedded chip, and in 1976 it was first demonstrated for a financial transaction. His company Innovatron licensed the patents and earned about €150 million in royalties. In 1977 Michel Ugon at Honeywell Bull built the first card with a microprocessor, at first as two chips, a processor and a memory, and in 1978 patented a self-programmable single-chip microcomputer for cards.

France turned the idea into a mass product: from 1983 its payphones took chip phone cards, the Télécarte, and in 1992 every French Carte Bleue debit card received a chip. The international card companies agreed in 1993 to develop a common standard, EMV, whose first version appeared in 1994. In the United States, where magnetic stripes survived much longer, it took the card-data thefts of the 2000s to force the change (see Albert Gonzalez).

Cards from Paderborn

In 1980 Helmut Rübsam, head of ORGA-Druck in Dreieich near Frankfurt, a maker of magnetic-stripe cards founded in 1972, met Rainer Blome, an electrical engineer at the University of Paderborn, who proposed putting a microprocessor on the card. Talks with Honeywell Bull came to nothing, so Blome developed his own: a prototype with an EPROM was shown at the Hanover fair in 1984, and in 1985 ORGA presented a card with an eight-bit processor and a kilobyte of EEPROM, the first freely programmable smart card, with an operating system by another Paderborn graduate, Bernd Deutschmann. In 1991 Deutsche Telekom ordered the SIM cards for its D1 mobile network. ORGA Kartensysteme, owned by Preussag, the Bundesdruckerei and the Telekom subsidiary Detecon, grew from 20,000 cards a year in 1987 to three million in 1992 and 1,400 employees in 2001, before a crisis in 2002 and a takeover by the French Sagem in 2005; the last Paderborn development unit closed in 2015.

SIM and eSIM

The subscriber identity module is a microprocessor with memory that holds a mobile subscriber’s identity. Its forerunner was the Bundespost’s TeleKarte of 1988, a payphone card whose chip also admitted the user to the analog C-Netz. Giesecke & Devrient delivered the first 300 SIM cards in 1991 to the Finnish operator Radiolinja, which made a test call on its GSM network in Helsinki on 27 March 1991 and opened the network on 1 July (see Cellular Networks: 1G to 5G). The first SIMs had the size of a credit card; the smaller “plug-in” SIM of 25 by 15 millimetres arrived in 1993. Samsung’s Gear S2 smartwatch, launched on 8 October 2015, was the first device with an embedded eSIM, but the plastic SIM card has proved slow to disappear.

Smart cards also became a target for security engineering: IBM’s Caernarvon project, led by Paul Karger, built a smart-card operating system aimed at the highest Common Criteria assurance level (see Paul Karger).

Tron

In the 1990s chip cards attracted hardware hackers, among them the Berlin computer scientist Boris F., known as Tron. He was given a ten-month suspended sentence in 1995 for a device that fooled card payphones into accepting a fake 50-mark card, and in 1997 he published in the Chaos Computer Club’s Datenschleuder a method of defeating the decoder of the Kirch group’s pay-TV service. In the autumn of 1998 he was working on the Dutch Irdeto system. He disappeared on 17 October 1998 and was found hanged in a park in Berlin-Neukölln on 22 October. The autopsy found no signs of violence and pointed to suicide, but the motive and the time of death remained unclear, and a theory that he was murdered for disturbing the pay-TV business has never gone away. His diploma project, an ISDN telephone with digital voice encryption called the Cryptofon, is in the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin (see The History of Hacking).