macOS Sierra and CryptoTokenKit API

macOS Sierra

Apple presented macOS Sierra 10.12 during the World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2016 in June 13, 2016.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50807596

I could not find information about smart cards or CryptoTokenKit API in Apple Sierra preview page or Wikipedia Sierra page. I am not surprised. Smart cards are far less used than Siri for example :-)

I already wrote about the CryptoTokenKit API when this API has been introduced in "OS X Yosemite BETA and smart cards status" in July 2014, 2 years ago.

It looks like the CryptoTokenKit API is more mature now since the documentation is available as web pages (and not just .h header files).

CryptoTokenKit

The API documentation web page is "CryptoTokenKit Access Smart Cards and manage user interactions."

A lot of functions are marked as Beta. So I would expect some/many changes between the beta version(s) of Sierra and the official Sierra release planned for fall 2016.

Beta Software

This documentation contains preliminary information about an API or technology in development. This information is subject to change, and software implemented according to this documentation should be tested with final operating system software.

Conclusion

Only Apple developers have access to this first Sierra beta version. Because of the Apple NDA I can't write about information not already public.

A new beta version of macOS Sierra should be available in July 2016. This time it will be a public beta for everyone. More information to come...

UEFI Smart Card Reader Protocol implementation

Last year (May 2015) I presented the new UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface Specification) protocol called "Smart Card Reader Protocol" in the article "UEFI Smart Card Reader Protocol".

I also presented a sample Hello World application in "PCSC sample in C for UEFI".

Source code

The source code of my implementation of the protocol is available in my github edk2 project. Be sure to use the SmartCard branch.

The source code of the Hello World application and some other test/debug tools is available in my github UEFI-SmartCardReader-Samples project.

Integration in TianoCore

My "Smart Card Reader Protocol" implementation is a port of my CCID driver. So the core of the driver uses the same GNU LGPL v2+ license.
I proposed my implementation on the edk2-devel mailing list in "[edk2] [PATCH 0/4] Add an implementation of EFI_SMART_CARD_READER_PROTOCOL".

Unfortunately the copyleft license GNU LGPL v2+ is a problem for some TianoCore members. So my code was not integrated in TianoCore (a reference implementation of UEFI) and I moved to something else.

Conclusion

You can use my implementation of the "Smart Card Reader Protocol". Be careful the GNU LGPL v2+ license is fine with your project.