On Sep 11, 2009, at 7:05 AM, Nagy Gabor wrote:
No they are not unique. ATR only identifies the type of card. It's
not
a unique serial number.
Thanks. Then the question is modified to the following: Can I uniquely
identify smartcards without knowing anything about its "content"? We
only have a closed source app for windows, these smart cards are
black-boxes to me.
Yes, we do that on Sun Ray (Sun's thin client) by using a combination of
heuristics. Each card or card family has an associated "smartcard config
file" that contains the rules used to try to identify the card and to
extract a unique ID from the card. You would think that in the 21st
Century this would a piece of cake and all the card manufacturers would
have agreed on a single, cross-platform mechanism to provide a way to
do this. Ha ha ha I say.
Sun Ray smartcard config files do various things to accomplish the two
goals of identifying the card and extracting a unique ID. They can look
at the ATR, or attributes of the ATR (length, length of historical bytes
section, contents of all or part of the ATR, etc...) as well as issue
various APDUs that are known to work with the card that we are
attempting
to identify. This has proven to be an almost 100% reliable method for
over ten years.
None of the Sun Ray software is available via opensource although I am
trying to make some of the smartcard-identification-related bits
available
for the community to have a look at.
The smartcard config files themselves are all in human-readable format
and are available to look at on any Sun Ray server.
mike
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