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

[Chris Inacio]

I can't respond to Dr. Rousseau directly for list subscription reasons, so
sorry about screwing up the thread a bit.

I would be impressed if "gpg2 --card-status" didn't just hang.  I
understand that GPG has its own card server program and wants exclusive
access to the Yubikey.  GPG2 works on RARE occasion and I can't figure out
the why's and when's even though I've tried.

But from reading various looks at Apple's current smartcard service, it
seems like it doesn't get a lot of love.  I assume that Apple hasn't really
dedicated a significant number of engineers to this.  And from reading your
blog, Dr. Rousseau, it doesn't feel like you believe in Apple's roadmap, at
least from the parts that are visible.



On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 11:46 AM, Chris Inacio <nacho319 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/smartcardservices-dev/attachments/20150422/6d048b02/attachment.html>