how to read and write an unknown smartcard?

Question

I bought a number of smart-cards which I believe are Gemalto products.

Now I have these four ATRs (using ACR38 and ACR122U reader):

3B 8F 80 01 80 31 80 65 B0 85 02 02 ED 12 0F FF FF FF FF 9F
3B 7F 94 00 00 80 31 80 65 B0 85 02 02 ED 12 0F FF 82 90 00
3B 68 00 00 00 73 C8 40 11 00 90 00
3B 00

I searched the Internet but found nothing about these ATRs (neither in gemalto.com nor anywhere else).

How can I read and write this card?

Can I use the two smart-card readers to read and write these cards, or must I buy a new model?

Answer 1

Assuming that these are (emulated) ATRs from (contactless) cards, these look like processor smartcards. Other than that, there is not much information in these ATRs (at least the historical bytes contained in them do not reveal any human-readablke information).

Note, however, that particularly with the ACR122U, the default card "visible" through PC/SC could just as well be a SAM module integrated into the reader. Also the last ATR (3B 00) might not be an actual ATR from a card but looks more like the ATR that is typically simulated by the ACR122U if there is no auto-polling performed and no SAM available. In that case it is rather a placeholder to permit the reader to be activated through a PC/SC API in order to transmit reader-specific wrapped commands (see the ACR122U API manual for more information).

So if your cards are processor smartcards, you could try to send APDU commands to them. E.g. to find out what card it could possibly be, you could try to issue a SELECT (by DF name) command with an empty DF name and check what you get in response:

00 A4 04 00 00

But you could also try to select the EF.DIR, etc., if available.