Blog Information

This Blog provides technical details and resources for developing Applications using NADRA Smart Card

Saturday, June 1, 2013

Some Technical Details of NADRA Smart Card

The first and foremost task for discovering about this card was to have a Smart Card reader which could read this SNIC. I searched for a smart card reader in local market, but couldn't find it anywhere. Since I needed it for my FYP, I decided to import it. I selected ACR38U-IPC smart card reader. how I imported it and how much it cost me, that's another story to tell.


Finally, I received the smart card reader and attached it to PC, installed drivers etc. Then I inserted my SNIC into the reader, to my happiness,  SNIC was detected by windows as a new hardware and it tried to install its driver which succeeded by updating from internet. then I was able to see the smart card in device manager. here's a snap:
so, as you can see, it's "Oberthur ID-One Cosmo v7.0 128K" card. once I and you know this, then it becomes easy to find more details about this card.

this is the ATR (Answer To Reset) of this card:
3B DB 96 00 80 B1 FE 45 1F 83 00 31 C0 64 B0 FC 10 00 07 90 00 05
Protocol T=1
See the ATR Analysis

if you google for this card, you will find a lot of stuff. I will mention some basics and give the links to documents I've found about this card. the major challenge was to identify what actually this card is. that I've done and also I'm providing all the documents I found about this card so now it should be easy for anyone interested to study about this card and be able to develop applications for this. I will be sharing documents specific to this card only, for general knowledge about smart cards, java smart cards, there is lot of stuff available online.

So, our SNIC is a Java card. it has a processor, memory etc. it's like a small computer which is powered on and runs when it's inserted into a smart card reader. the features we have heard of about this card, such as that this card will be used as ATM card, driving license etc. these features are actually installed in this card in the form of small java functions which are known as Java Applets. to communicate with SNIC and get/give data to it, we must know the names of these Java functions and some parameters.
it's also possible to develop your own Java Applet and put it into the SNIC using smart card reader/writer.

A good news is that a few days ago I have discovered a Smart Card Reader keyboard which can read the SNIC (I think it is only reader and not writer). it's available in local market. actually these are branded keyboards which come as scrap to Pakistan. it looks like the image below. you should get one like this in Rs. 250-300 if you don't tell the shopkeeper that you want to use it for a special purpose because most of them are blackmailers. right now people don't even know the use of this keyboard, but as soon as the news spreads, this keyboard will become rare and very costly.

here are some of the documents. there will be another post describing the use of similar smart card in many other countries and we'll see their documentation, applications etc. it will help understand about this card. everyone is encouraged to find out more about this and share with me and others as well.