Author: johann.d

  • Mifare Plus in a nutshell

    Following the breakdown of Mifare Classic security, NXP has released a new generation of contactless cards to fill the gap, the Mifare Plus. To ease the migration of the existing applications, this new chip keeps the memory model of the Mifare Classic : the card is structured as an array of 16-byte blocks, and the…

  • Upgrade in our PC/SC SDK (release 1.20)

    The release 1.20 of SpringCard PC/SC SDK is now available in the Download section of the website (direct link to latest version : http://www.springcard.com/download/find.php?file=pcsc-sdk). This SDK is meant to be used with our products in the SpringCard CSB6 Family (CSB6, Prox’N’Roll PC/SC, EasyFinger and CrazyWriter). People working in the ’emerging’ NFC field will be glad to discover the updated versions of NFCTool,…

  • Java + PC/SC = accessing smartcards from a web page

    The Java Smartcard I/O API (javax.smartcardio, JSR 268) introduced in Java 1.6 is the bridge between PC/SC readers and the Java world. Java-based applications and applets may now communicate with smartcards in an interoperable and portable way. This makes it possible for web pages to access data stored in smartcards, or to invoke services running…

  • Mifare is out of 32-bit IDs

    NXP Semiconductors has recently warned their customers that they are running out of unique IDs for the Mifare Classic family. A detailed application note is also available to give precize answers to technical questions. Since the beginning, every card in the Mifare Classic family (1k, 4k, Mini) has a 32-bit identifier, said to be unique…

  • SpringCard and Effitic ready for ‘at-home’ card-based services

    Effitic, a french software engineering company, has set up a working demo that demonstrates how public transportation cards could be reloaded at home thanks to SpringCard’s contactless readers. In this architecture, all the business logic and the security components (SAM or HSM) are centralised in Effitic’s back-office server. A lightweight Java applet runs in a…

  • Cardpeek – open source tool to read the content of smartcards

    We’ve discovered a new open source project (lead by “L1L1”) that sounds promising. Cardpeek is a Linux tool to read the contents of ISO7816 smartcards. It uses a PC/SC reader to communicate with the card, and its GTK GUI represents card data is a tree view. Cardpeek list of supported cards is expandable thanks to…