[SmartcardServices-Dev] Effort to rebuild smartcard services on Mac from ground up

[Chris Inacio]

Hello all,

I'm mostly a frustrated smartcard user at this point, but I play the role
of developer (or development manager) in my day job.  So I have a
combination of Mac OS X 10.10, Centrify (with its smartcard additions),
PIV/CAC type smart cards, a Yubikey NEO, and would like it if GnuPG
actually worked.

Mostly, the CAC/PIV type smartcards actually work (I believe really related
to the Centrify, but who knows, really…) but the YubiKey + GnuPG just do
NOT work reliably (if at all.)

Strangely, it seems like pcsctest can always find the card readers /
devices attached to my machine reliably; but I do occasionally run into
random bugs of things that simply don't work.  And many of my colleagues
with Mac's often have numerous problems with smartcards operating
correctly.  (I personally have 3 smartcards, not including the Yubikey
NEO.)  In generally, various colleagues use some combination of: the
opensource tokend updates, Centrify, and Thursby PKard.  But all solutions
seem to have bugs / issues filed with Apple.

My question is, to someone who hopefully has thought about this a lot more
than I have looked into it:  how many man months would it be to start
over?  Take an up-to-date drop of PCSC from open source and do a new
cleanroom port to Mac possibly?

Second question:  would people even want that?

Regards,
Chris Inacio
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