Smart Card

I'm wondering how difficult it is to program a smart card and what software product to use to program/interface?

Any ideas on this would be appreciated.

Try searching RSA's site here or one of the other smart card vendor's sites. I am not sure if they would keep any information on this on their site, but you never know until you try. They may require you to have a login to access information like that; if so, you may be out of luck. Also, you could try a google if you haven't already. I have never experimented with programming a smartcard, but let me know how it goes; I would be interested in it.

Peace

You could do it your self

the parts for a smart card reader can be bought at your local hardware (small parts like transistors) dealer..

you could hook it up to the serial port.


http://cuba.xs4all.nl/~hip/index.html

hope this helps..

Interfacing with a card is easy, you can do that in most languages using a vendor specific API. But the functionality i limited, you can only store and retrieve data and digital certificates, sign documents and some other stuff. In some cards the actual signing of a document is done withing the smart-card, so that the private key of the digital certificate is never exposed. Neat!

All of that stuff is easy, because you are not programming the smart-card, only interfacing an API. You probably want to dig deeper, and that requires more experience than I have. I guess you need to program your own drivers to interface with a smart card-reader. Or maybe even design your own reader. That's my best guess anyway... You have some wicked low-level programming coming for you! Good luck! :)

Hey thanks for the replies...

All that sounds like what I expected. Doable but a challenge. Makes it even more interesting if u ask me......... :)

I will post the results.

Actually it's not difficult at all and almost anything can be stored on a card.

Check with the manufacturer of the card reader for an SDK and away you go. My company stores a 1024 certificate and 3 small 2k files for each employee.

The only challenge is paying for the SDK - some are $300-$400 !

u can buy a card instead of programing it,
it is realy difficult to do it