Do smartcards have an identical serial number and how can I read this value with Delphi. I am using Towitoko keyboard with smartcard reader and i am using Towitoko smartcard component for delphi.
No, unfortunately there is no standard way to identify a smartcard as to model/family type nor is there a standard way to extract a unique ID from a card.
I write smartcard code for the Sun Ray product (www.sun.com/sunray) and we support 40+ different smartcards for our session mobility feature. I have code that performs various operations with the cards to try to determine the card family/model and then to extract a unique ID.
Shame on the smartcard industry for not providing a universal way to identify a card tpye and to extract a unique ID. This isn't exactly a new concept in the field of electronics and computer-connected devices.
Oh, and double shame on the industry for allowing different AIDs for OpenPlatform/GlobalPlatform Card Manager applets so that what could have been a reasonable way to determine card type and serial number information doesn't work in many cases.
IMHO, the industry has reaped what it has sowed over the past twenty or so years by steadfastly refusing to work together and continuing to propogate proprietary solutions for no good reason.
Think about this - what if when you went to your local computer store and bought a PCI card, say a VGA card or a sound card or some other peripheral card when you plugged it into your system the system had no way to identify the card nor what resources it needs, and you needed custom manufactuer-provided software to just get to the point where the system knos that it's a VGA or sound or modem card, and in the process of running that custom software you had a good chance of crashing the system or scrambling other cards in the box? No one would stand for this in today's computer world, yet we can't seem to get the smartcard industry to even agree on a simple, universal identification scheme that doesn't require poking random APDUs into unknown cards to see what happens.
Think about the ATR - what an absolutely wonderful place that would have been to embed a multi-byte product/family/vendor code as well as a unique ID; you reset the card, and then you get all the info you need in a single transaction to know if the card in the reader is one that you can work with.
I know, I'm probably preaching to the chior, but I have very little patience when I hear the industry complaining about how smartcards have not been as embraced by the general public for general computing applications.
That's it for my rant for the week :-).
mike
-- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Michael Bender E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sun Microsystems, Inc. Tel: 831-401-9510 14 Network Circle Tel: x.31807 Menlo Park, Ca. 94025 Mailstop: UMPK14-260 MD: VPN/IMAP
Never give up! Never surrender!
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