In the Information Society, the smart card, or smart device with its processing power and link to its owner, will be the potential human representation or delegate in Ambient Intelligence (Pervasive Computing), where every appliance or computer will be connected, and where control and trust of the personal environment will be the next decade challenge.

Smart card research is of increasing importance as the need for information security grows rapidly. Smart cards will play a very large role in ID management in secure systems. In many computer science areas, smart cards introduce new dimensions and opportunities. Disciplines like hardware design, operating systems, modeling systems, cryptography and distributed systems find new areas of applications or issues; smart cards also create new challenges for these domains.

CARDIS, the IFIP Conference on Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications, gathers researchers and technologists who are focused in all aspects of the design, development, deployment, validation and application of smart cards or smart personal devices.This volume contains the 20 papers that have been selected by the CARDIS Program Committee for presentation at the 6th International Conference on Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications (CARDIS 2004), which was held in conjunction with the IFIP 18th World Computer Congress in Toulouse, France in August 2004 and sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). With 20% of the papers coming from Asia, 20% from America, and 60% from Europe, the competition was particularly severe this year, with only 20 papers selected out of 45 very good submissions.

Smart Card Research and Advanced Applications VI presents the latest advances in smart card research and applications, and will be essential reading for developers of smart cards and smart card applications, as well as for computer science researchers in computer architecture, computer security, and cryptography.