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Comment by kevindong | Hacker News Reader

What's TechCrunch's source on all of this info? Or is it just pure speculation/reasoning?

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I was talking with a friend a few days ago about how the physical Apple Card would work in reality. During that conversion, I came up with the idea that maybe the physical card contains a custom chip on it that an iPhone can communicate with via NFC. That NFC chip would be able to rewrite the card info (i.e. card number, exp. date, and CVV) at will to the physical chip on the card (the one that talks to the actual payment terminals) and that's how Apple is going to issue cards that never technically expire. Perhaps they'll do something similar with the mag stripe (their promo videos pretty clearly show that the physical card does indeed have a mag stripe)?

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The chip on the card is an entire computer running a Java program every time it's activated by the terminal. What it communicates via that terminal can vary, the same way the NFC tap-to-pay terminals can vary. There's no need for it to carry a conventional card number or expiration or anything.

My reasoning operates under the assumption that the chip that communicates with the payment terminal sends a card number to the terminal at some point in time. I do not know how the protocol works in reality however.

That might be a fallback option but modern terminals do not need a card number.

Why on earth would it run java?

It is nothing like the real Java. Almost no regular data type is supported and there are severe limitations. [1]

You should view it as using a safe language instead of something like C. If Rust had been invented 20 years ago, it might have been Rust instead.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Card

fascinating. thanks!

The secure element on iOS devices is a Java Card (https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.... p. 47).

Basically all smart cards use Java Card. There's an ISO standard, so I'm sure it's possible to implement your card in other environments, but everyone uses Java Card.

Because these practices were set in the mid-to-late-90's when it was fashionable to Java all the things

Did Apple tell that it never expire? Maybe the card just does not contain an expiration date, but at some point it will expire and need to be replaced.

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