| commit | author | age | ||
| ec8c66 | 1 | # Enable NFC on Dell ControlVault2 |
| JK | 2 | |
| 3 | ## Introduction | |
| 4 | ||
| 5 | Recent Dell laptops - i.e. E7470 - contain integrated Broadcom NFC (contactless), (contacted) chip card and fingerprint reader (USB 0a5c:5834 - Broadcom BCM5880 USH). | |
| 6 | ||
| 7 | The contacted card reader works out of the box on Linux, yet NFC reader does not - no RF field is present. | |
| 8 | ||
| 9 | Instructions from [blog.g3rt.nl](https://blog.g3rt.nl/enable-dell-nfc-contactless-reader.html) are not applicable: the ushdiag.exe does not recognize the device at all. | |
| 10 | ||
| 11 | This project aims to enable Linux to read NFC cards the same way Windows does. | |
| 12 | ||
| 13 | ## Usage | |
| 14 | ||
| 15 | 1. Clone the repository. | |
| 16 | 1. Install python3 and python3-usb. | |
| 13e114 | 17 | 1. Run: `./bcm20795.py on` (use `sudo` if necessary). |
| ec8c66 | 18 | 1. Run `pcsc_scan` or whatever you prefer. |
| JK | 19 | 1. Enjoy! |
| 20 | ||
| 21 | To disable the reader replace `on` with `off`. | |
| 22 | ||
| 23 | ## Supported devices | |
| 24 | ||
| 25 | Currently only the following devices were tested and are known to work: | |
| 26 | ||
| 27 | * `0a5c:5834` | |
| 28 | ||
| 29 | Firmware update (done during driver installation on Windows) may be required. | |
| 30 | ||
| 8287e9 | 31 | ## Tested on |
| JK | 32 | |
| 33 | * Dell Latitude E7470 | |
| 34 | * Dell Latitude 7280 | |
| 6b959a | 35 | * Dell Latitude 5491 |
| 8287e9 | 36 | |
| ec8c66 | 37 | ## How it works? |
| JK | 38 | |
| 39 | Python script sends the same sequence of commands the Windows driver does. The traffic was sniffed using USBPcap and Wireshark (kudos to [~jkramarz](https://github.com/jkramarz) for that). | |
| 40 | ||
| 41 | The data is sent as-is and responses are read, but no error-checking is done. | |
| 42 | ||
| 43 | The semi-annotated traffic dump is available as [traffic.txt](traffic.txt) - feel free to decode it further! | |
| 44 | ||
| 45 | The communication protocol is based on NCI (NFC Controller Interface). Unfortunately the specs are not freely available and some proprietary extensions are used. libnfc-nci and kernel sources were used to decode some structs. | |
| 46 | ||
| 47 | ## References | |
| 48 | ||
| 49 | * https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/libnfc-nci/ - the driver of NFC component (BCM 20795), | |
| 50 | * https://blog.g3rt.nl/enable-dell-nfc-contactless-reader.html - this does not work on E7470. | |
