magnetic stripe card reader software how it works

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Posted in Misc Hacks Tagged Imaging, Magnetic developer, magnetic stripe card, magnets Post navigation doesn’t mention any particular application, we love this circuitous hack anyway! While magnetic developer was designed for debugging faulty recording systems went a step further scanning the “developed” card, and writing a tool to decode the images and extract the card data.

There’s an awesome video of the process in action below. So the iron particles are attracted to these flux reversal points on the stripe creating a visible pattern. The magnetic field is strongest where the poles meet. With each bit the orientation of the magnet changes, something like the diagram to the right.

Long magnets represent 0s and short magnets 1s. To the particles, the magnetic stripe looks like a series of magnets lined up. The developer uses micron sized iron particles in a suspension which are dropped onto the stripe. used a magnetic developer which is designed to allow visual inspection of the magnetic stripe.

While hackers routinely read and write stripe cards, this is the first time we’ve reported on optically imaging and decoding data from the magnetic stripe. Has been reading magnetic stripe card… optically!

Magnetic stripe card reader software how it works