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Inside an EMV Card: File Structure, AIDs, and SFIs Explained
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If you’ve ever worked on anything related to payments, especially with EMV cards, you know that sometimes it feels like opening a black box. You swipe or insert a card, magic happens, and the transaction gets processed. But what’s really…
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Understanding APDU: How Terminals Talk to Smart Cards
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When I first worked on a smart card integration project years ago, I came across logs filed with hexadecimal codes. My instinct was to skim through them but as I would soon learn, those hex values were the hearth of…
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TLV Demystified: How EMV Cards Store and Share Data
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When I first started working on EMV integration in one of our terminal projects, I was overwhelmed by how much technical jargon was thrown around. One of the most confusing things I came across early on was something called “TLV”…
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The 4 EMV Books Explained: A Beginner’s Guide
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Hello again! If you’ve been following my blog, you might remember my previous project about ISO 8583, where we decoded message formats like HEX, ASCII, and Binary. That deep dive into payment protocols was a big part of my journey…
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EMV Made Simple: What It Is and Why It Matters
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This post is the starting point of a full-blown series consisting of around 45 blog posts that will explore the entire EMV payment ecosystem from the fundamentals to advanced cryptographic operations, issuer scripts, and even certification. If you’ve been meaning…
About Me
Hi I’m Assi—I’m dedicated to advancing cashless payment technology and sharing insights with fellow developers and solution architects on my blog, Cashless Nomad.
I embrace a mobile lifestyle by replacing cash with digital payments, enabling seamless transactions anywhere. Going cashless keeps me connected, agile, and financially flexible—perfect for traveling light and skipping currency hassles.
Checkout my other blogs at marai.dev