Extended APDU cards

In a previous article "Extended APDU status per reader" I wrote about readers status regarding extended APDU. Since I have a rather long list of ATRs (1147 different cards) I tried to find cards supporting extended APDU.

Extended APDU cards

Cards can declare support of extended APDU in the historical bytes part of the ATR. Using my ATR parsing program it is visible as: Extended Lc and Le fields

Cards found

I used my stress test program to scan the complete ATR list. I found 5 cards with expicit extended APDU support:

• ePerso - German ID card
• SignTrust (www.signtrust.de) or Infinion SLE66CX680PE with Starcos 3.2
• Serbian Identity Card
• TCOS 3.0 / NetKey 3.0
• GnuPG card V2

Not all the cards declare extended APDU support in the ATR. So the list above is not exhaustive.

Comments

The 5 cards do all support the T=1 protocol. The German ID card does also support T=0. This is because extended APDU is very hard to use using T=0.

The 5 cards are used for asymmetric cryptography (RSA) with "long" keys (2048 bits or 256 bytes) and so require the use of extended APDU.