That’s all! Maybe a little bit of patience as well. Windows supports smart cards by default so you shouldn’t need anything special. Card readers are mostly plug-and-play though if it needs drivers, it should come with the package. The one I’m using is a GemPC Twin from Gemplus (now Gemalto), but almost any card reader that supports PCSC will do. Most probably this will be a credit card or a debit card with a chip on it. What do you need? Firstly you’ll need an EMV chip card. You can get the EMV specifications from EMVCo directly, it’s freely downloadable. In this example, I’ll be showing you snippets from the official EMV4.1 specification, which I’ll mention in passing but not in details. I’ll show the script twice - the first one in pure APDU, and the second, a higher-level Jaccal script using Jaccal APIs to do the job for you.

In this example I’ll break down a sample Jaccal script line-by-line in its raw APDU format to show exactly how information is retrieved from the chip card.

I personally believe it’s daunting to many programmers because the mechanism of talking to a smart card is something quite different from the higher-level programming we’re used to, which is one of the reasons why Thomas and I created Jaccal. Retrieving information from an EMV compliant chip is not an inherently difficult task.

Almost all payment chip cards (except in France) uses a worldwide standard called EMV (a rather meaningless acroynm from Europay-Mastercard-Visa, the founding members of the collaboration that created this standard though, ironically this US-created standard is used mostly outside of US).

Java emv card reader