Saturday, January 23, 2016

ATR list study

Since 2002 I maintain a list of ATR (Answer-to-Reset). The idea is to identify a smart card given its ATR.

The project started as a Perl script (ATR_analysis from the pcsc-tools project), then moved into a Python script (parseATR.py from parseATR sub-project of pyscard-contrib) and is now a online web application: Smart card ATR parsing.

I now have 2098 ATRs in my list and I think it is time to make some statistics.

Articles

This article is a meta article (as I did with "CCID descriptor statistics") and contains only pointers to other articles:

Documentation

You can read the Wikipedia pages about Answer-to-Reset and ISO 7816.

Or you can pay 178 CHF (162 €) to buy and read the ISO 7816-3 document (the price is the same for a PDF version or a printed version on dead trees).

Yes, I find it stupid to have to pay to read standards. Luckily the Internet is build upon free (as in free beer) Request for Comments (RFC) from The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF®) and not ISO protocols. But that is not the subject of this article.