macOS High Sierra and smart cards: known bugs

High Sierra: macOS 10.13

As I did for Yosemite 10.10 ("OS X Yosemite and smart cards: known bugs") and El Capitan 10.11 ("OS X El Capitan and smart cards: known bugs") I propose to maintain a list of know issues in PC/SC on macOS High Sierra 10.13.

The native API to use smart card on macOS is CryptoTokenKit since Yosemite 10.10 (see "PCSC sample in Objective-C" or "PCSC sample in Swift") but many applications need to be portable to Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux and the common PC/SC API is used instead. So it is important to have a correctly working PC/SC API on macOS.

Bug list

I will list known (by me) bugs and will try to maintain the list in the future if/when the bugs are fixed.

Some of the bugs have been reported a few years ago but are still present in High Sierra.

1. OS X El Capitan bug: PC/SC is not unusable after fork() (reported in November 2015)
2. OS X El Capitan bug: SCardBeginTransaction() returns different error codes than on GNU/Linux and Windows (reported in December 2015)
3. macOS HighSierra bug: SCardTransmit() returns different error codes than on GNU/Linux and Windows (reported in September 2018)
4. macOS HighSierra bug: SCardStatus() returns SCARD_W_RESET_CARD instead of SCARD_W_REMOVED_CARD (reported in September 2018)
5. macOS HighSierra bug: SCardEndTransaction() returns SCARD_W_RESET_CARD instead of SCARD_W_REMOVED_CARD (reported in September 2018)

Missing features

The missing features are not bugs but services provided but the PC/SC API on Windows and GNU/Linux that would be nice to also have on macOS.

1. OS X El Capitan missing feature: SCardGetStatusChange() and number of card events (reported in December 2015)
2. OS X El Capitan missing feature: SCardGetStatusChange() and "\\?PnP?\Notification" (reported in December 2015)
3. OS X El Capitan missing feature: add support of TAG_IFD_POLLING_THREAD_WITH_TIMEOUT (reported in December 2015)

Conclusion

The bugs listed above are not critical for many users. But they may surprise some developers when they try to understand why their code is working fine on GNU/Linux but has a strange behaviour when executed on macOS.