Short APDU readers supporting limited extended APDUs

Because of a bug report on the OpenSC mailing list I discovered that some CCID readers declare to support Short APDU only but can in fact accept APDU with more than 256 bytes of data.

I found only 2 readers with this particularity in my list:

• TianYu CCID SmartKey
• XIRING MyLeo

Technical details

These 2 readers declare in the USB descriptor (the .txt file):

• Short APDU level exchange in dwFeatures
• a dwMaxCCIDMessageLength greater than 271 bytes

Effects

These readers declare to be short APDU so they should not be able to send or receive more than 256 bytes of data. 256 bytes of data + 5 bytes of header (CLA, INS, P1, P2, Lc) = 261 bytes. With the 10 bytes of CCID header we have the 271 bytes indicated in dwMaxCCIDMessageLength for all the (normal) Short APDU readers.

Up to version 1.3.12 (May 2010) my CCID driver would not support APDU bigger than 261 bytes with these readers. For example Mac OS X provides the CCID driver version 1.3.8 (June 2008). But in version 1.3.12 I modified the buffer size from 261 bytes to 64k bytes. This was needed for extended APDU readers.

The side effect of the change in version 1.3.12 is that the CCID driver will not reject APDU commands greater than 261 bytes.

Results

The Xiring MyLeo reader will support APDU of up to 512 bytes (522 minus 10 bytes for the CCID header).

The TianYu CCID SmartKey reader/token will support APDU of up to 502 bytes (512 minus 10 bytes for the CCID header).

If you want to use (limited) extended APDU with these readers on Mac OS X you have to upgrade the CCID driver to at least version 1.3.12.

Conclusion

These two readers are using a strange CCID combination. I do not say it is illegal but it is clearly a hack to support some form of (limited) extended APDU.