'RFID Scanner': what does it mean?

The RFID Scanners are SpringCard's 'autonomous' contactless readers, i.e. when no software operation is involved on host side to fetch data from contactless cards or RFID tags.

The SpringCard RFID Scanners family includes access control readers (where data are typically transmitted to the control unit through a one-way-only interface, such as Dataclock or Wiegand), and Bluetooth or USB computer peripherals that behave approximatively like a barcode scanner (they « scan » the RFID label and simulate key presses on the keyboard, just as most barcode scanners do).

Our RFID Scanners are highly configurable -even on the field-. They can read serial numbers (CSN) from any ISO/IEC 14443 contactless card or ISO/IEC 15693 vicinity tag. They may also read data from most existing smartcards and RFID products, including popular NXP MIFARE, ICODE, and DESFire families.

Configuring the RFID Scanners

Principles

All our RFID Scanners are configured via one or more master cards. On-the-field configuration is as easy as presenting the master card in front of the reader, and holding it during 3 seconds.

Security concerns are important to us : each customer is able to build its own set of master cards (using free SQ844P software package and a set of blank Desfire cards). The digital signature scheme ensures that the master cards created for one customer will be useless on another's readers.

Card acceptance templates

The SpringCard RFID Scanners are able to manage different kind of cards, and different sources of data on the card -ISO/IEC 14443 & 15693 protocols, raw data from memory cards such as Mifare and ICODE, data records from Desfire or any other T=CL smartcard...

A card acceptance template defines how the reader will identify the card to be read, and how it would get the actual data (serial number, block reading, file selection and reading, authentication keys to be used for Mifare or Desfire, etc). The template also defines which formatting is to be applied to the data (translation to ASCII or to Decimal, constant prefix or suffix, etc).

Each RFID Scanner is able to process up to 4 card acceptance templates simultaneously (+ 1 for master cards). This means that 4 different kinds of contactless cards can coexist on a single site, and can be read by a single SpringCard contactless reader or RFID scanner.

Creating your own master cards

An example of operation:

Ready-to-use master cards available from SpringCard

SpringCard may provide ready-to-use master cards to configure your RFID Scanners immediately, even in case you don't have a card reader/encoder. Note that in this case, you won't be able to change the default cryptographic key by your own one. Therefore, your products will still accept master cards not created explicitely for you.

Prox'N'Roll RFID Scanner Master Cards packages

The Prox'N'Roll RFID Scanner Master Cards package includes 2 master cards :