PC/SC under Unix/Linux/Mac with PCSC-Lite

Products in the SpringCard CSB6 Family (CSB6, Prox’N'Roll PC/SC, EasyFinger and CrazyWriter) are smartcard readers, compliant with both standards PC/SC and CCID.

This makes those products usable on non-Windows operating systems thanks to PCSC-Lite CCID driver.

Introduction

PC/SC standard

PC/SC is the de-facto standard to interface Personal Computers with Smart Cards (and smartcard readers of course). Even if PC/SC has been initialy promoted by Microsoft -and has been implemented for long in Windows-, the standard is not limited to MS’ operating systems.

PCSC-Lite is an open source implementation of PC/SC, part of a global project named MUSCLE (Movement for the Use of Smart Cards in a Linux Environment). Despite its name, the PC/SC stack offered by MUSCLE is not limited to GNU/Linux anymore. Their compatibility list now includes other popular UNIXes, including Apple Mac OS X and Solaris.

CCID standard

The USB CCID specification published by the USB Workgroup aims to normalize USB smartcard readers, in order to have a single driver (supplied once for all with the operating system) for virtually any reader from any manufacturer.

PCSC-Lite project includes an open source CCID driver. This driver has been tested with SpringCard CSB6 on GNU/Linux, and should work on the other operating systems targetted by the project.

Disclaimer and warning

There’s no relationship between SpringCard and the developers involved in the open source PCSC-Lite project.

Apart from this explanation page, SpringCard can’t provide any technical support related to PCSC-Lite middleware nor PCSC-Lite CCID driver.

CSB6 Family on GNU/Linux

In this part we’re going to install PCSC-Lite and CSB6′s drivers on Ubuntu 8.04.1 (Hardy). Some parts of the procedure may vary a little, depending on the GNU/Linux distribution you’re working with.

Do not connect the device to your computer now ! You must download and install the driver before connecting the product.

Download

Go to pcsclite.alioth.debian.org to download both PCSC-Lite and its CCID Driver :

PCSC-Lite : file named pcsc-lite-x.y.z.tar.bz2, “x.y.z” being the version number,
CCID driver : file named ccid-x.y.z.tar.bz2, “x.y.z” being the version number.

Installation

Connect as root.

Uncompress both archives.

N.B. : On Ubuntu (and on some other Linuxes), connecting as root is not possible. In this case, one must prefix every command by “sudo”, to gain root’s priviledges temporary.

Installing PCSC-Lite

Open a terminal and go to the directory where you have uncompressed the PCSC-Lite archive. Enter the commands :

./configure
make
make install
Troubleshooting

If the configure step fails with message error: usb.h not found, check that you have the libusb library installed. If needed, please install it, and then give the path to this library to the configuration script: ./configure LIBUSB_CFLAGS=....

On Ubuntu or Debian, you may alternatively use apt-get to download and install the libusb-dev package :
apt-get install libusb-dev

Installing CCID driver

Open a terminal and go to the directory where you have uncompressed the CCID Driver archive. Enter the commands :

./configure
make
make install

Enabling PCSC-Lite daemon

PCSC-Lite’s pcscd process must be running in the background.

Starting pcscd manually

Open a terminal and go to the directory where PCSC-Lite has been installed. Typically, this is /usr/local/sbin/pcscd.

In this directory, enter the command ./pcscd.

Configuring pcscd to be launched on startup

It is better to have pcscd automatically started when the computer starts. To do so, you must add pcscd in the list of processes started in rc.local or equivalent startup script.

Connecting the device

Plug the device onto an unused USB connector.

In a terminal, use the command lsusb to verify device’s information.

lsusb result

In the above screenshot, we have a CSB6 connected : Vendor ID=0x1C34 (Pro Active and SpringCard), Product ID=0×7124 (CSB6 Ultimate, PC/SC mode).
Other devices will have different ProductIDs ; all products in the CSB6 PC/SC family have a ProductID in the 0×7100 to 0x71FF range.

Validating the installation

To test the newly installed reader, we’ll use gscriptor, an open source PERL software, able to exchange APDUs with smartcards through the PCSC-Lite stack.

Installing PCSC-Perl

Go to ludovic.rousseau.free.fr/softwares/pcsc-perl and download pcsc-perl-x.y.z.tar.gz, “x.y.z” being the version number.

Uncompress the archive. Install the package as follow :

perl Makefile.PL
make
make install

Go to ludovic.rousseau.free.fr/softwares/pcsc-tools and download pcsc-tools-x.y.z.tar.gz, “x.y.z” being the version number.

Uncompress the archive. Launch the gscriptor program.

gscriptor windows

Card connect

Select the contactless slot of your CSB6 reader (usually the first reader in the the list),

Put any compliant contactless card on the reader,

Connect to the card (Reader -> Connect).

APDU exchange

Write the APDU