Optimize the standby consumption of the M519 and leverage LPCD

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An HF NFC/RFID reader or coupler usually spends most of its operating time waiting for a contactless card to arrive.

To detect this arrival, the reader or coupler must

  1. ensure continuous or quasi-continuous transmission of its carrier, since it is its own RF field (magnetic waves) that remotely powers the card,
  2. send search frames in an un-interrupted loop, using all the protocols it supports (REQA/WUPA, REQB/WUPB, Anticall, SENS_REQ, etc), to give the card the opportunity to respond as soon as it has been powered-up.

Obviously, this means that most of the operating time consists of… wasting a lot of energy, just to wait.

The Tartar Steppe (Il deserto dei Tartari) is a novel by Dino Buzzati, that tells the story of an officer, who spends all his energy waiting for the arrival of a contactless card. Well, not exactly, but, you’ve got the idea.

In the SpringSeed M519 module, and also in most other SpringCore products, the card waiting policy (polling policy) can be optimised to reduce the average power consumption of the product.

In highly demanding use cases, the LPCD (low-power card detection) feature can even dramatically reduce standby power requirement, to less than 10mA (however, this comes at the price of some implementation constraints, which you must be aware of before using this mode).

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NFC Tools, a cool application for working with NFC tags and a PC/SC reader

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Today we’re going to offer you an article that’s a little different from our usual fare, since it’s less about going into the details of how to implement a SpringCard product than about presenting a small piece of software that can help you discover the world of NFC and contactless smart cards.

It’s called NFC Tools, and has been developed by Wakdev.

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How to configure a Puck as a reader to read a SpringPass virtual card using keyboard emulation?

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SpringCard Puck family products can be used to read contactless passes carried by NFC smartphones. In the SmartReader operating mode, the reader is standalone to run and the computer receives RFID/NFC pass data as if someone would type it on the keyboard.

SpringPass by SpringCard is a service for generating NFC passes in order to dematerialize contactless cards or RFID badges by virtualizing them on mobile phones (smartphones). On Apple iOS (iPhone) architectures, the system is based on Apple VAS technology. On Android architectures, the system is based on Google Smart Tap technology.

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How to read RFID/NFC passes with SpringCard PC/SC couplers

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SpringCard contactless PC/SC couplers (NFC/RFID HF) can be used to read contactless passes carried by NFC smartphones.

In particular, the Prox’N’Roll HSP PC/SC and the PUCK configured as PC/SC have been certified :

  • by Apple for reading NFC passes stored in the Apple Wallet application (“Apple VAS” protocol, formerly branded as “PassKit”),
  • by Google for reading NFC passes stored in the Google Pay application (“Google VAS” protocol, still branded as “Smart Tap” or now “Google Wallet”).

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Using SpringCard PC/SC Couplers with a Raspberry Pi 4

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SpringCard PC/SC Couplers like the H663 family (CrazyWriter HSP, Prox’N’Roll HSP, TwistyWriter HSP…) and the new SpringCore family (PUCK…) are well supported by Linux systems thanks the open-source PCSC-Lite stack and its CCID driver. All these devices are easy to operate on early Raspberry Pi with little to no specificities.

This has changed on Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspian Bullseye and their new power-saving policy: by default, the system now shuts down any USB device that appears as being “unused” — which is namely the case of any PC/SC Coupler until a card is inserted or presented ;-).

For correct operations of any SpringCard PC/SC Coupler with a Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspian Bullseye, the integrator must therefore disable the USB power control, and this article explains how to do so. It may also be useful to anyone trying to troubleshoot disconnection issues affecting any PC/SC device when used together with an embedded Linux system where USB power saving is enabled by default.

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SCardSniffer2 spies the exchanges between a PC/SC application and a smart card

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5 years ago, SpringCard introduced SCardSniffer, a tool that spies the exchanges between Windows applications and the PC/SC subsystem. SCardSniffer works by introducing a hook over winscard.dll.

Although this method is still perfectly working in most cases, it comes with some technical complexity (1. the sniffer and the sniffed application must both run on the same subsystem, either Win32 or Win64, hence 2 versions of the sniffer and 2. the injection of the hook is likely to be disabled on security-enforced computers and 3. it may also triggers some antivirus/malware detection tools, which leads to an unnecessary stress).

SCardSniffer2 is a new tool that offers basically the same function, but with a much simpler architecture.

SCardSniffer2 installs a new virtual smart card reader and acts as a relay between this virtual reader and the real reader, where the real card is.

The application to be spied must be reconfigured to connect to the virtual reader (instead of the real reader); SCardSniffer2 is then able to record all the APDUs exhanged between the application and the card.

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