STARCOS cards

STARCOS is a card operating system family from  Giesecke & Devrient

Version 2.3

Version 2.3 is supported by OpenSC.to be precise: iKey 3000 which contains Starcos). The StarKey? 100 (USB) token from G&D doesn't seem to work. It features Starcos SPK 2.3, but adding usb:096e/0005 to the ikey3k driver ids in openct.conf still won't access the card.

Currently only Starcos SPK 2.3 is tested. If you have a newer version, please report back.

Version 3.0

Version 3.0 is not supported by the OpenSC Starcos driver yet. Support is required to make German eGK/eHBA work.

Version 3.1

There also seems to be Version 3.1 which only does ECC signatures instead of RSA. This is not yet supported by OpenSC as well.

G&D is a very nice company, their APDU manuals are public available, all you need to do is send an email asking for them, and they send you the latest version. This is great! Thanks G&D!

Version 3.2

This OS version is used in the current (2010) signature cards (Card 3.2, MCard 3.2, MCard100 3.2) offered by SignTrust?. It appears to support RSA up to 2048b key length. See  the BSI certification of these cards.

Erasing cards

Only test cards with StarCOS are erasable. If the last byte of the return value of "opensc-tool -s 80:f6:00:01" is 0x00 the card is afaik not erasable, if it's 0xc0 it should be erasble.

Eutron CryptoIdendity ITSEC-P tokens contain normal cards and thus are not eraseable.

Pages linking to STARCOS:

Back to Index