Portable data carrier having an operating error counter

摘要

A method in a portable data carrier for safeguarding the data carrier against external attacks on the data carrier, wherein at least one counter is employed in the data carrier. A specified command is safeguarded such that it is executed by the data carrier only when the at least one counter lies in a specified values range. The at least one counter is decremented before an execution of the command and incremented only when the command has been executed without interruption. The at least one counter here is settable multiple times, in particular even after the issuance of the data carrier to a user.