20130822 (Thursday, 22 August 2013)

Aha, Frank Cornelis wrote an article Belgian EID Security where he gives a summary of what I’ve found in the source code of eid-applet. As an example he explains how to retrieve the national number. And especially he explains:

The identity file itself has a simple Tag Length Value structure. The national number has Tag number 6.

After discovering what means TLV I discovered files like TlvParser.java and understood why my yesterday’s version of EIDReader didn’t display more information: the second tag is the chip number, and this value contains 0x00 bytes which are meant to be converted by ChipNumberDataConvertor.

And ChipNumberDataConvertor is ` not the only one <https://code.google.com/p/eid-applet/source/browse/trunk/eid-applet-service/src/main/java/be/fedict/eid/applet/service/impl/tlv/>`_ …

All this is so complex that copying this code would not lead to any sustainable result. So I must import, not copy, parts of eid-applet into my applet.