DATA INTEGRITY IN SMARTCARD TRANSACTIONS

The invention relates to data integrity in applications employing smartcards, in particular smartcards in connection with remote stations like personal or desktop card readers or similar inexpensive terminals. Since smartcards today are extensively used particularly in the financial and banking field, the data integrity issue is of particular importance. In such applications, any interrupted data transfer between the smartcard and a terminal can result in making the smartcard unusable and/or corrupt the data, any of which in turn often greatly affects the user. The solution according to the invention is, in brief, to apply an “adapted atomicity approach” to the smartcard environment, i.e. to adapt and use an atomic approach for smartcard transactions. To implement this, two essential features are incorporated, one being the provision and use of an internal trigger mechanism on the smartcard, the other being the provision and use of a failure-resistant recovery scheme on the smartcard, in particular a record index swapping scheme for data handling on the smartcard during the transaction.