"general purpose OS is fundamentally inadequate for trusted operations"

[Robert J. Hansen]

> Smart card is not the device authors discuss in that paper, but it is
> a small, evolutionary step toward it.

Not really.  What's the trusted device in the system?  It's still the
desktop PC.  A compromise there leads to so many different and
catastrophic attacks that it needs to be called a game-over.

> It is the best that many users who agree with the quoted sentence
> have at their disposal at the moment. It might not prevent all
> imaginable attacks, but it could prevent enough of those to make it
> worth deploying.

No.  The game-over condition without a smartcard is, "my computer gets
compromised by an attacker."  The game-over condition with a smartcard
is, "my computer gets compromised by an attacker."

There are *some* use cases where smart cards lead to better risk
mitigation.  But as a general rule, no, smart cards are not ready for
prime time.