Reaching the Cards Apple Wallet Leaves Behind: Direct NFC Acquisition of PRO100, HUMO and UZCARD Payment Cards on iOS

Abstract

Contactless payment from a phone has become routine in many markets, but the convenience is unevenly distributed. Apple currently lists Kazakhstan among supported Apple Pay markets, but not Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan or Turkmenistan. In Uzbekistan, HUMO and UZCARD are the two national interbank retail card systems, and both include contactless card products. This paper describes an application-level card-capture method for tested PRO100, HUMO and UZCARD cards on NFC-capable iPhones. Using Core NFC, the reader opens a tag session, selects an application when necessary, and recovers the primary account number (PAN) and expiry date from the returned data. The difficult parts were empirical: identifying AIDs that worked on the tested cards and decoding card-generation-specific response layouts. The implementation was later hardened around a hybrid parsing path that prefers BER-TLV/EMV fields when present and keeps the observed offsets only as a legacy fallback. The paper also gives a system-level workflow, a threat model, explicit failure handling, a platform comparison, and a reproducible evaluation protocol. No claim is made that the same behavior is available unchanged on every iPhone/iOS combination, on iPadOS or macOS, or under future Core NFC policy. The method captures registration data; it does not emulate a card, authorize a payment, or treat an NFC read as proof of ownership.