PCSCCheck, the all-in-one tool to validate and tune your PC/SC installation

October 14, 2021September 7, 2021 by johann.d

An analysis of the questions that are the most frequently asked to our technical support shows that many issues and concerns are due to the settings or the behaviour of Windows operating system itself.

This is particularly the case in security-enforced corporate environments, where strict administrative policies may prevent the user to install the right driver, or even prevent the applications to access local smart card readers.

The fact that Windows raises a couple of notifications (“Setting up a device”, then “The smart card requires drivers that are not present on this system”) every time a card is inserted in a PC/SC reader for the first time is also the source of many questions, that this article will address.

How to be sure that the SpringCard PC/SC driver is installed on Windows?

October 14, 2021August 2, 2021 by johann.d

Since all SpringCard USB PC/SC couplers comply with the USB CCID specification, they are supported by the generic CCID driver supplied by Microsoft as a part of the Windows operating system. As a consequence, when connecting a SpringCard PC/SC coupler to a computer for the first time, this coupler is associated to the generic “Microsoft Usbccid Smartcard Reader (WUDF)” driver by default.

This is a problem for many users, since this generic driver has many limitations that make it un-suitable for most of the use cases.

In this article, we’ll expose its 3 most obvious limitations, and expose the 2 different methods to installing the right driver.

PC/SC on Linux and Mac OS X with Mono

September 15, 2021December 10, 2020 by johann.d

One the goals of the Mono project is to make Microsoft .NET applications runnable on Unix systems. Using Mono, it is therefore now possible to maintain a single C#/.NET code base, that runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

In this context, SpringCard’s PC/SC SDK (https://www.springcard.com/en/download/find/file/pcsc-sdk) has been updated, so that it now enables developers to write PC/SC applications in C#/.NET, that can execute on Windows, as well as on Linux and Mac OS X platforms.

SCardSniffer spies the exchanges between a PC/SC application and PC/SC middleware

October 22, 2021September 5, 2016 by johann.d

SCardSniffer is a new tool used to spy the exchanges between Windows applications and the smart cards or NFC tags that are accessed through a PC/SC reader (or coupler).

On a Windows computer, all card-aware applications communicate with smart cards or NFC tags through the system’s PC/SC library, winscard.dll.

Limitation of 10 smart card readers with SCardListReaders

October 14, 2021May 31, 2016 by johann.d

Many customers have noticed that the Windows’ PC/SC subsystem is not able to handle more than 10 readers (or slots in case of multi-slot readers). Actually, the SCardListReaders function -the system call to get the list of available PC/SC readers- is limited to 10 readers max. On old versions of Windows it was possible (although … Read more

SpringCard NetPCSC for PCSC-Lite

May 19, 2016April 8, 2016 by johann.d

Introduction

In 2016, SpringCard introduces a new family of network-attached NFC/RFID couplers, providing PC/SC functionnality on top of TCP/IP. The family is built from the SpringCard E663 module, the Ethernet-world counterpart of H663 (for USB world) and K663 (for serial world). The two first products of the family are the TwistyWriter-IP PC/SC, made for OEMs, and the FunkyGate-IP PC/SC, targetting access-control applications. The second one is also available as a FunkyGate-IP+POE PC/SC, where ‘POE’ stands for ‘power-over-Ethernet’, i.e. the device takes its power from the network cable.

To support all the devices based on the E663 module, SpringCard has developed from scratch a PC/SC driver for Windows (see this page).