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.
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 :
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.
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.
An analysis of the questions that are the most frequently asked to our technical support shows that many issues and concerns are due to the settings or the behaviour of Windows operating system itself.
This is particularly the case in security-enforced corporate environments, where strict administrative policies may prevent the user to install the right driver, or even prevent the applications to access local smart card readers.
The fact that Windows raises a couple of notifications (“Setting up a device”, then “The smart card requires drivers that are not present on this system”) every time a card is inserted in a PC/SC reader for the first time is also the source of many questions, that this article will address.
Since all SpringCard USB PC/SC couplers comply with the USB CCID specification, they are supported by the generic CCID driver supplied by Microsoft as a part of the Windows operating system. As a consequence, when connecting a SpringCard PC/SC coupler to a computer for the first time, this coupler is associated to the generic “Microsoft Usbccid Smartcard Reader (WUDF)” driver by default.
This is a problem for many users, since this generic driver has many limitations that make it un-suitable for most of the use cases.
In this article, we’ll expose its 3 most obvious limitations, and expose the 2 different methods to installing the right driver.