That depends on budget and the amount of security you want.

I'm familiar with Dallas Semiconductor iButtons
(http://www.ibutton.com).

The only caveat is the price; where a normal setup costs around $50 or
more for a reader and, say, $8 for a card, the Dallas system costs $15 for
readers and between $30-$60 for the tokens, depending on quantity and
options ordered.

The advantages:

1. Almost indestructible stainless steel tiny can construction. It's
waterproof - wear it swimming even. If someone attempts to cut the case
or otherwise abuse it via thermal or electrical energy, the device
conveniently erases all of its data very rapidly - its aim is to prevent
the theft of data.

2. JavaCard 2.0 compilant, comes in two flavors; one has 6k of RAM, one
has 134k of RAM. You can load a lot of applets on this one.

3. Very simple connection - two wires. Therefore the readers are very
rugged... they can connect via serial, parallel, USB. The interface chips
are very small, so you could very simply build a reader into an embedded
device for around $3 per device (plus the serial port).

The iButton code presented on the linuxnet page does not work with
Muscle. The University of Michigan had some code which worked but they
took it down due to copyright issues; however, Dallas has since released
public domain code to interface to the buttons. I'm going to look at it
this weekend to see if I can integrate it into Muscle.

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