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Michel Ugon born on December 18,1940 in Paris (75), is a French electronic engineer. He is inventor of the microprocessor smart card. He is recognized worldwide as one of fathers of electronic banking and is an expert in cryptology.

Professional career
Michel Ugon began his professional career at Sexta as head of the laboratory, and after working for a while for Jules Richard as director of the electronics laboratory, he joined the department of computer industrialization of the CII in 1971, wher he has in charge of the development of removable disks. He then became director of the X2 computer project ( known by acronym 7740). Following the merger of CII and Honeywell, to become CII-HB, Michel Ugon was assigned to the smartcard project at the end of 1976. he led the R and D of CP8 and became Director-General in 1979.

At the European level, Michel Ugon chairs the European association, Eurosmart and is an expert I, bank card security and cryptology. He is an active member of the ISO 7816 Standards Commission, which determines the physical characteristics of smart cards: size and position of the contacts, communication protocols and formats of exchanging data...)

The memory card
Principal landmarks in the history of the memory card are the patents filed by Arimura from Japan in 1967 and by the Americans Ellingboe, in October 1970 ,and Halpern, in August 1972.

In 1970, France took the leadership of R and D in the field with the research centers of two of its public companies, France Telecom and Honeywell-Bull.

Roland Moreno, an autodidact who was at the time a freelance journalist for the news magazine l'Express, had regular contact with the CNET ( research Center of France-Telecom ). During his visits, he exploited the inadequately protected information and took advantage of the inertia of the two companies under state control to file, opportunistically, in March 1974, a patent for a card with a reprogrammable memory; The inventive concepts of this card were defined by the electronic engineer, Jean Moulin, editor of the patent. Roland Moreno thus became known as the inventor of the memory card, despite his lack of any personal research means. Other patents followed, filed by Honeywell-Bull in 1975 and Dethloff in 1977, with the aim of improving security. The memory card performs arithmetic subtraction: by counting units. This basic method is applied, for example, to phone cards and parking cards.

The transition from the memory card to the smart card
In 1976, the company HB-CII created a "Research" Division, headed by Jean Pierre Satre, a mining engineer, who invited Michel Ugon, an electronic Engineer from ESEO, to direct the laboratory located in Louveciennes, on a project to secure information systems. The team assembled by Michel Ugon, following his own investigations and mindful of security, slowly moved away from the simple memory card, which had proved to be vulnerable to fraud in many ways. this research group, which brought together multidisciplinary expertise in microelectronics, cryptography, physics, chemistry, software, systems architecture, and packaging, managed to solve the problem of the integration, into a plastic card, of a miniature computer of the smallest possible size, i.e. a microprocessor. Michel Ugon deposited around thirty patents in all, the most important being: . August 1977, a patent for a card with a microprocessor chip and a memory chip. . April 1978, the SPOM patent, abbreviation of Self Programmable One Chip Microprocessor ( a monolithic, self-programmable microprocessor), which covers all cards with a single microprocessor card: credit cards, health insurance cards, SIM cards of mobile phones etc. . July 1980, the patent for microprocessor card ( which refers to the French patent in 1977 above).

He was also the first to produce a card with microprocessor: . April 1979: the release of a card with two chips: a microprocessor and a volatile memory, the result of cooperation with MOTOROLA company, called CP8. . March 1981: the release of the single chip card, application of the SPOM patent ( one chip card ).

The expert in cryptology
Without the integrated microprocessor of the "smart card", the object of Michel Ugon's patent, smart cards with a single memory chip would not have been able to invest banking, a domain which requires a high level of security and confidentiality. All bank cards produced in France are manufactured in France are manufactured under CP8 license. The expert Michel Ugon suggested that inexperience and overconfidence were jeopardizing smart card security. Indeed, as early, the available technology ( 640 bits) would have enabled improvement in security simply by changing the authentication protocol. Despite the repeated warnings to nbanks in 1997, the Humpich case broke out in 1999, demonstrating that cracking the security system to produce fraud bank cards was possible. For Michel Ugon, this was not a surprise because ever since 1983 he was aare of the vulnerability of the card. The problem arises in term of cost. The security level required is consistent with that of a device that can resist the mafia. Ugon Michel became President of the Security Group of the European Association of Industrials of the Smart Card, Eurosmart.

Awards and honors
. 1986 National Merit Medal

. 1991 The Smart Hall Fame

. 1998 Smithsonian Institute Washington

Publications
. 1990 Review Contemporary Cryptology : The Science of Information Integrity, published an article signed jointly with Louis Guillou and Jean-Marc Quisquater. . 1994 L'odyssée de la carte à puce . October 1994 Review boards and Systems Applications: Naissance du microprocessor autoprogrammable monolithique, le plus petit microordinateur du monde.

The gnomonics expert
Apart from his industrial activities Ugon Michel is a member of the Commisssion of sundials of the French Astronomical Society.