Welcome to the Knowledge Center, sponsored by BrickRed. We hope you will find this evolving collection of technology insights, news items, technical reports and other documents useful, and that the material assembled here, which represents many points of view, will promote a deeper understanding of machine readable card technology and card enabled solutions.

Public Key Cryptography (PKI)

Public key cryptography, also known as asymmetric cryptography, is a form of cryptography in which a user has a pair of cryptographic keys - a public key and a private key. The private key is kept secret, while the public key may be widely distributed. The keys are related mathematically, but the private key cannot be practically derived from the public key. A message encrypted with the public key can only be decrypted with the corresponding private key. read more...

2DBarcode

A 2D barcode is a two-dimensional way of representing information. A barcode is a machine-readable representation of information in a visual format on a surface. Traditionally barcodes stored data in the widths and spacing of printed parallel lines, but today they also come in patterns of dots, concentric circles, and hidden within images. Barcodes can be read by optical scanners called barcode readers or scanned from an image by special software. A 2DBarcode, printed in the space typically taken by magnetic strip on credit card, can store up to 2Kb of machine readable (human unreadable) data. read more...

RFID – A2Z
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an automatic identification method, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags or transponders. An RFID tag is an object that can be attached to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification using radio waves. Chip-based RFID tags contain silicon chips and antennas. Passive tags require no internal power source, whereas active tags require a power source. read more...

Digital Signatures
In cryptography, a digital signature or digital signature scheme is a type of asymmetric cryptography used to simulate the security properties of a signature in digital, rather than written, form. Digital signature schemes normally give two algorithms, one for signing which involves the user's secret or private key, and one for verifying signatures which involves the user's public key. The output of the signature process is called the "digital signature".