Universal "Chip Based Smart Card" Snooping Device

The objective of this project is basically to design, build and test a Universal "Chip
Based Smart Card" Snooping Device. This device would function to notify its user of
the actual communication between the smart card and the smart card reader. The
existence of this device not only serves as an educational tool but also saves a lot of time
and money that are spent on debugging by smart card manufacturing companies. In
addition to that, technological advances in the smart card world can also be sped up with
the help of this device for research and testing.
The hardware design of the project has been divided into 3 main sections, the snooping
module, the communication module and the processing module. The snooping module
taps the data, the communication module formats, encodes and transfers the data to the
processing module, and lastly the processing module translates the data into useful
information and display's it.
The project has been divided into two major milestones where the first one was to set up
the snooping device prototype with the processing module being a Computer. The second
milestone on the other hand is the final design itself which would be to replace the
Computer with a PALM in order to make it portable and affordable.
This report gives a complete and detailed illustration on the hardware and software
design process for the Universal "Chip Based Smart Card" Snooping Device. All aspects
from the design decision, the underlying transmission protocols and also programming
logics have been dissected and elaborately explained in the report. The design presented
is a complete working device that fulfills all the objectives that have been set. The
hardware device is certainly good enough to be marketed as it works flawlessly and
achieves the most important objective of the project, which is to obtain the data transfer
between the card and the smart card reader.