Open Software, Protocol and Format Documentation Project

The Understand project (Open Software, Protocol and Format Documentation Project) at GoogleCode has a plethora of information on all kinds of smart cards and readers (mostly contactless).

Java Card programming: best practices

Read and remember. Very useful tips, especially about reducing memory consumption. A short summary of how the JCVM allocates memory is also given, including the amount of overhead per object.

Essentials

Hacking fingerprint USB drives

Excellent hack walkthrough and security analysis of two standard fingerprint-secured USB storage drives. The vendor reacted in a mature, proactive way to the news that their drives were hacked. That's not something you see very often... respect to USB-Secured.com.

Principles of secure Java development.

Nicely elucidated.

Reading public EMV data on a VISA card

The JavaEmvReader project provides a quick and simple way to parse the unsecured information on a VISA card - a bit easier than the alternative mentioned in a previous post.

One example application is described with the embedded element and Google Wallet in a Samsung Nexus S.

Accessing mobile SE in Android

Excellent, detailed tutorial on how to access the embedded secure element in an Android 4.x phone, and the followup on actually sending APDUs to it.

Off-the-shelf MIFARE Classic hacking tools

Looks promising ...

Java Card 3 implementations

The Java Card 3 spec was released by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) in 2008 but its adoption by vendors has been very slow. A list of currently available Java Card 3 implementations can be found here on OTN. For convenience, here is a shortlist of the vendors:

• CardLogix
• Giesecke&Devrient