[Muscle] read card type information

[Sylvain Ferey]

At 20:00 08/02/2008 +0100, chrysn wrote:
>[...]
>now my question is: is there a reliable way of telling which type of card 
>a card is (ie, PGP card / bank card / ecard (austrian health system) 
>/  whatever other card) without having to send commands special to the 
>respective types that might potentially do bad things on other cards?

no there is no comprehensive list of ATR (and except easy cases, an ATR 
does not describe a card content).

if your wish is to provide a generic notifier and/or an UI tool used as 
unique control panel, you can (just) define a way to let third parties (who 
provide actual cards) to register their ATR on your list, optionally with 
some APDU to transmit in order to test the card (for instance: does the 
card actually contain the applet with a given AID), and provide some 
callbacks to a) call a 3rd party service or b) obtain some information from 
a 3rd party service in order to display them in your UI'ed tool.

Sylvain.