CARD AUTHENTICATION SYSTEM IN IC CARD SYSTEM

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a card authentication system capable of discriminating authentication by an IC card owner or by an agent. SOLUTION: When authentication is performed by a person except the IC card owner, encipherment is performed in a card for more than a plurality of times with respect to information for authentication (for example, a challenge code comprising random numbers) transmitted from a server unit by utilizing a secret key or an agent code corresponding to an agent who has activated the secret key is enciphered (for example, by keyed hashing with the agent code as a key) together with random numbers transmitted from the server unit. Accordingly, the server unit can discriminate whether the authentication is performed by the card owner or by the agent through the enciphered code returned as a response code. COPYRIGHT: (C)2011,JPO&INPIT