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Our company now begins to use SmartCards as the online portal for tax administration that we use requires authentication.

I have never before worked with SmartCards. The device drivers are installed properly. The diagnostic tool that was included with the card reader confirms that the card reader operates successfully and can access the smart card. It also shows up correctly in the windows device manager.

However, when I access the closed area of the online portal via browser, where the authentication is needed, it just displays a general error saying that no SmartCard is inserted or the reader might not be connected.

(For testing I used IE and Google Chrome.)

We use a proprietary SmartCard software at another Domain-PC for a proprietary VPN software. These SmartCards are also available and do work when using a browser, hence my question if always a special software is needed as middle ware.

I am grateful for any advice from anyone who has ever had experience with SmartCards

LumenAlbum
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1 Answers1

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Applications need to use the smart card library using some interface. Unfortunately there are several different interfaces. PKCS#11 is a standard interface available on all operating systems.

You can find more info here.

drcelus
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  • "How do you talk to a smart card and the smart card reader? Using some software provided by the vendor of the smart card reader." So I would need to get software from the SmartCard vendor in order for browsers to be able to access it? – LumenAlbum Aug 28 '12 at 11:06