iOS Question Possible to get ATR from smartcard on iOS?

[Sandman]

(Nothing in this post is about NFC using NDEF.)

When a NFC reader connects to a card it automatically sends a RESET command to the card, which makes the card return with an ATR (Answer To Reset). The ATR contains some information about what type of card it is. This can then affect how you decide to interact with it. So it's pretty good info to have.

To my knowledge it is not possible to request this information in some other way from the card, so I imagine the ATR should be available from when the mobile connected to the card. Do we know if it is available and possible to extract this somehow?

(I am not an expert, if it in fact is possible to send some sequence of bytes to the card to get a (new) ATR, I would be interested in that too.)

 

[Erel]

In iOS it might be possible using private APIs: https://stackoverflow.com/a/63788738/971547
It will require some OBJC / Swift knowledge to implement it. As this is not public API Apple can reject your app for using those APIs.

 

[Sandman]

I can't see either ATR or ATS mentioned there, do you think that post still is relevant to my question..? (As I said, I'm no expert.)

 

[Erel]

Not sure. Anyway it doesn't look like a good solution.

 

[Sandman]

After some more investigation I found that it's not possible in iOS. So no, not a good solution and also it's not a good solution to rely on the ATR/ATS.