What It Actually Takes to Integrate the Romanian Electronic ID Card Over NFC

If you have integrated an electronic passport or another chip-based identity document before, you will enter this project with a reasonable set of assumptions. Most of them are partially wrong for the Romanian CEI. It is not that the ICAO standards do not apply — they do, as a starting point. The problem is that the CEI is a national identity card with country-specific extensions that appear nowhere in complete public documentation. What follows is a map of the terrain based on a completed spike on a Pixel 8 with a real Romanian CEI card — a spike that took considerably longer than expected, not because the problem is theoretically complex, but because every reasonable assumption had to be verified through direct testing. What You Already Know — and What Still Applies Any ICAO-based electronic identity card uses PACE (Password Authenticated Connection Establishment) to establish a secure channel before any data can be read. The CEI does the same, using the CAN code — 6 digits printed o