The purpose of storing IDL data on machine-readable media on the IDL is to:
- increase productivity (of data and IDL use),
- facilitate electronic data exchange, and
- assist in authenticity and integrity validation.
This document thus specifies the following:
- mandatory and optional machine-readable data,
- the logical data structure,
- encoding rules for the machine-readable technologies currently supported.
To prevent unauthorised access to the data contained on a contactless IC (e.g. by eavesdropping), the privacy of the licence holder is protected via basic access protection requiring a human-readable and/or machine-readable key/password on the IDL to access the data on the PIC (via protected-channel communication). The implementation details of this function are defined in ISO/IEC 18013-3.