OpenSC

OpenSC provides a set of libraries and utilities to work with smart cards. Its main focus is on cards that support cryptographic operations, and facilitate their use in security applications such as authentication, mail encryption and digital signatures. OpenSC implements the  PKCS#11 API so applications supporting this API (such as Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird) can use it. On the card OpenSC implements the  PKCS#15 standard and aims to be compatible with every software/card that does so, too.

OpenSC is written by an international team and is licensed as  Open Source software under the  LGPL license version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. For a list of all authors and contributors as well as detailed license information see AuthorsAndCredits.

If you are new to smart cards, see OverView and FrequentlyAskedQuestions pages. Always check SecurityAdvisories.

The latest stable version of OpenSC is 0.11.13 (released on 16.02.2010). PreReleases of the upcoming 0.12.0 are also available.

Before you GetStarted with using OpenSC be sure to check the SupportedHardware list as typical smart cards are incompatible with all other smart cards and come with no public documentation.

DeveloperInformation is available for those who want to build smart card capable applications. Developers who want to GetInvolved with OpenSC are needed as well.

Sub-projects

OpenSC effort consists of various sub-projects that can be used independently as well, without OpenSC:

(The following should be moved/merged into other content and some pages merged/deleted)

Starting Points

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