Reading RFID tags - Adam Laurie's RFIDIOt and the CardMan 5321 USB reader

As I noted in my last post, Improvised RFID Blocking Wallets: Preventing PayPass Skimming, I have recently been working with an OmniKey Cardman 5321 USB RFID reader in Windows. The reader is compatible with a broad range of RFID cards (From Omnikey's website):

• Philips/NXP: MIFARE®, DESFire®, MIFARE ProX®, and i.code
• HID: iCLASS®
• Texas Instruments: TagIT®
• ST Micro: x-ident, SR 176, SR 1X 4K
• Infineon: My-d (in secure mode UID only)
• Atmel: AT088RF020
• KSW MicroTech: KSW TempSens
• JavaCard: JCOP / SMART-MX in RSA mode with 2048 bit keys

Omnikey provides drivers, as well as a simple diagnostic tool which can read tag IDs and can provide basic information about the contents of the tag. If you want to do more with RFID, you need a more full featured software package, and Adam Laurie's RFIDIOt handily answers that call. RFIDIOt reads ICAO 9303 encoded Machine Readable Travel Documents, and both Data Group 61 (MRZ) and DataGroup 75 (Encoded Information Features - FACE), as well as many other data types.

To make RFIDIOt work, I installed Python 2.5.2, as some of the packages it relies on work with 2.5, but not with 2.6. You'll need the following software packages to make it all work:

• pySerial (2.4 Win32)
• pyscard (1.6.7 Win32-py2.5)
• pycrypto (pycrypto-2.0.1.win32-py.25)
• the Python Imaging Library (PIL-1.1.6.win32.py2.5)
• pywin32-212 (pywin32-212.win32-py2.5)

You can ignore the need for PCSCLite for the purposes of this install.

You will also need to modify RFIDIOtconfig.py to use the USB device. Simply modify the section that reads:

# serial port (can be overridden with -l for Windows)
line= "SERIAL”

With the following:

# serial port (can be overridden with -l for Windows)
line= "USB”

A simple re-compile of RFIDIOtconfig.py results in an updated RFIDIOtconfig.pyc, and you're ready to go.
Once you have done this, you should be able to test your reader by executing multiselect.pyc, which is a simple looping tag ID reader. If you see the tag IDs when the green LED on your CardMan turns red, you've succeeded.

RFIDIOt presumes that you will have a directory in your system root called /tmp - if you want to capture any data for testing, you'll need to manually create the directory on Windows systems.