NFC: Extended length APDU support?

Tagged: android, APDU, extended, FloJack, iOS, isodep, NFC

Viewing 5 posts - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

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April 21, 2015 at 4:38 am #52691

Tobias
Participant

Hi everybody,
does anyone in here know if the FloJack supports extended length APDUs? Normally the amount of data to send to an IsoDep-tag is limited to 256 Bytes (normal APDU), but since i needed to send more data in a single frame i would need extended length APDU with up to 65536 Bytes.

This can be tested easily with a NFC-capable credit-card or sth similar, which is normally an IsoDep-tag. Just try to send random 1000 Bytes and see what happens (in normal Android-API an IOException is thrown for example, telling you that 261 Bytes is the maximum for most devices).

Thanks in advance!

Greetings,
Tobias

May 5, 2015 at 8:52 am #52750

Richard
Keymaster

Hi Tobias, I got word back from the engineering team at ACS. Currently the FloJack/ACR35 cannot support Extended APDU. If there’s really a need for the extended APDU commands, they can modify the driver libraries and the firmware of the reader. However, this would require a pre-order of readers in quantities of 500 to be worth the engineering time.

Also keep in mind that due to the audio jack data limitation, the speed is not very high. So in case we implement the extended APDU, the time to execute the extended APDU will be extremely slow. Like in the order of a second or so.

May 5, 2015 at 9:12 am #52751

Tobias
Participant

Hey Richard,
thanks for your effort!

We would definitely need support for extended APDU, since we planned to work with the german eID-card, that requires you to send some ~400 Byte security certificates for validation to the card.

At first we planned to use no external hardware at all, but since most Android-phones also don’t support extended APDU, we were searching for easy ways to still get it done somehow.

Right now, the whole project is frozen, and its really unlikely to be continued soon, since extended APDU doesn’t seem to be supported by most NFC-hardware out there and only makes problems…

Anyway, thanks for your support again, keep it going!

Greetings,
Tobias

May 29, 2015 at 7:31 am #52894
Klaus
Participant
Hi Tobias,

My company is also very interested in extended APDU support.
Want to have a chat about that topic sometime in the near future ?

Greetings,
Klaus
- This reply was modified 9 years, 6 months ago by Klaus.
- This reply was modified 9 years, 6 months ago by Klaus.
June 1, 2015 at 3:30 am #52905

Tobias
Participant

Hello Klaus,
for the above reasons, we froze the project for uncertain time and I’m currently working on something else. If your company is interested in using NFC with the new german eID-card, i’d suggest you either focus on using the official readers (they are supported on most Android devices that support USB host mode) or stick with the few phones that support extended APDUs out of the box (some Xperia M and L models do).

Otherwise this whole things seems to be a blind end, i spend couple weeks on research, just to find out that extended APDU is rarely supported…

If you still need more information, feel free to ask!

Sincerely,
Tobias
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