Archives October 2021

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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RFIDDiscover (formerly MifareDiscover) is a GUI software provided by NXP to help the developers explore the features of their contactless cards (Mifare, Desfire, NTAG and ICode) and learn how-to use them from a real application.

This software is available to customers under NDA with NXP, through the DocStore document delivery platform (ref. SW1866).

This article shows how-to get started with this RFIDDiscover, in the aim of using it together with SpringCard devices. This is the preferred method to learn how those cards work, before starting the development of any software that would use them for data storage and/or secure transactions.

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