Sunday, April 12, 2015

pcsc-lite and CCID driver source code moved from SVN to GIT

The major projects hosted at https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pcsclite/ have moved from SVN (subversion) to GIT as the Version Control System (VCS).

Alioth.debian.org

The new URLs for the source code are:

The source code at the SVN server is still available at https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/pcsclite/trunk/ but will not be updated any more.

Github

I also provide a github version of the source codes at:

You can either use use the alioth or github server to clone the repositories.

Master repository is alioth

But be careful that they are different repositories. One repo is NOT the mirror of the other repo. They are both handled by hand.

The "official" repository should be the one at alioth.debian.org.

Conclusion

Maybe this change will bring new blood to the development :-)

The real reason for the move is that alioth only provides an ssh access to push code. So it is not possible to work from places where connecting to an Internet server using ssh is not allowed. I should be able to push code to github from anywhere (since github can use https) and then merge it and push it to alioth from more net-friendly places.

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Some PC/SC bugs of Yosemite 10.10 fixed in 10.10.3

The 10.10.3 release of Yosemite solves some (1 - one) of the PC/SC bugs introduced in 10.10 and that I reported in "OS X Yosemite and smart cards: known bugs".

I updated the main article with the list and also each individual bug documentation.

Some PC/SC bugs are still present in 10.10.3 but they are "minor".

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Smart card reader p0rn pictures

Federal Communications Commission

Devices emitting radio frequency signals must be declared at the FCC to be sold in the USA (or something like that). Smart card readers are such devices since they use electricity.

I let you read the wikipedia page to know more about the FCC.

Search engine

The Office of Engineering and Technology (part of the FCC) provides a search engine at Equipment Authorization Search.

Example: Gemalto MESPROXDUB

I searched for all the Gemalto devices. The list contains 381 results.

I found the MESPROXDUB also known as IDBridge CL300 (previously known as Prox-DU) smart card reader. I have it in my own list at Gemalto Prox Dual USB PC Link Reader.

The result of the search is a list:

9 Matches found for FCC ID MESPROXDUB
View Attachment Exhibit Type Date Submitted to FCC Display Type Date Available
Confidentiality Request Cover Letter(s) 01/17/2011 pdf 01/17/2011
External Photos External Photos 01/17/2011 pdf 01/17/2011
Label ID Label/Location Info 01/17/2011 pdf 01/17/2011
Internal Photos Internal Photos 01/17/2011 pdf 01/17/2011
Operational Description Operational Description 01/17/2011 pdf 01/17/2011
Test Report Test Report 01/17/2011 pdf 01/17/2011
Test Setup Photos Test Setup Photos 01/17/2011 pdf 01/17/2011
User Manual - Prox-DU Users Manual 01/17/2011 pdf 01/17/2011
User Manual - Prox-SU Users Manual 01/17/2011 pdf 01/17/2011

For a strange reason it is not possible to directly access the referenced PDF documents. You will get a "You are not authorized to access this page." if you click on the links in the table above. You need to get them from the real result page itself.

Pictures

What is interesting for a hardware hacker are the "Internal Photos". This is called "hardware p0rn".

You can search "hardware p0rn" in Google. Maybe some pictures from Google are NSFW. There is also a tumblr dedicated to hardware porn with nice (and safe) pictures.

Pictures of the Gemalto MESPROXDUB

I will not include all the pictures here, just "best of" a selection.






Conclusion

You can also search for "Apple" in the search engine. You will find photos of the internal of the iPhone. But pictures from iFixit are of a much better quality. I do not know an equivalent of iFixit for smart card readers.