usb smart card reader

[Joe Blue]

Hey ChromeOS devs,

I am writing enterprise medical software we are making an effort to port our software to run our Android software on ChromeOS.

I  need to use the USB Smart Card functionality of ChromeOS to authenticate Health Cards.

Based on  the docs, ChromeOS supports smart card authentication based on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC/SC

My problem is that in Germany and other European countries the health care system uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CT-API

Any ideas ? Really stuck.

thanks in advance

Joe (Germany)

[Maksim Ivanov]

Hi,

Currently the CT-API is not exposed by the Smart Card Connector app that you referred to. It provides only the PC/SC API.

However, there are some existing wrappers that provide the implementation of the CT-API on top of the PC/SC API, e.g. (just google'd it, didn't check whether it's actually functional): https://github.com/sixtyfive/pcsc-ctapi-wrapper

[Joe Blue]

Hey Maksim

I had a look at the link, and the thing that i noticed is that pcsc-ctapi-wrapper only seems to support card readers where the pin in put on from the keyboard.

They say this on that web page.

All the German  Health Card readers have the pin input on the actual card reader. I assume because then the crypto layer is contained on that hardware, and then it just spits out XML over USB to the computer. Its XML normally with the other readers i have used in Germany.

Also each card reader has 2 card slots in Germany. One for the Patient, and one for the Doctor. THey kind of handshake with each other.

So, for example, on that web page is this card reader called the "ST-1044U"

http://www.cherry.de/cid/card_reader_SmartTerminal_ST-1044U.htm?rdeLocaleAttr=en&cpssessionid=SID-C7409D2C-B7298F75&WT.mc_id=

But the Cherry card reader that works for the German health system is this:

http://www.cherry.de/cid/card_reader_eHealth-BCS_Terminal_ST-1503.htm?

From the pictures you can see it has two card reader slots. 

[Joe Blue]

It turns out the Cherry reader IS supported by Chrome and ChromeOS

http://www.cherry.de/cid/card_reader_MKT_PLUS_Terminal_ST-2052.htm?

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=220971#c195

Yeah !!

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[Maksim Ivanov]

Joe,

I had a look at the link, and the thing that i noticed is that pcsc-ctapi-wrapper only seems to support card readers where the pin in put on from the keyboard.
They say this on that web page.
All the German  Health Card readers have the pin input on the actual card reader. I assume because then the crypto layer is contained on that hardware, and then it just spits out XML over USB to the computer. Its XML normally with the other readers i have used in Germany.

I don't know all the details regarding CT-API. So it may be that these issues are specific only to this pcsc-ctapi-wrapper, or it may be that there are some tricky incompatibilities between these two APIs. The former can be solved by finding the better wrapper or extending the existing one; while the latter could be more difficult to address.

Also each card reader has 2 card slots in Germany. One for the Patient, and one for the Doctor. THey kind of handshake with each other.

PC/SC-Lite, on which we based our Chrome OS application, generally supports multi-slot readers. But, I think, each slot corresponds to a separate "reader" in terms of PC/SC API. I don't know whether this implies any problems for your application.

 

It turns out the Cherry reader IS supported by Chrome and ChromeOS
http://www.cherry.de/cid/card_reader_MKT_PLUS_Terminal_ST-2052.htm?
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=220971#c195
Yeah !!

Just a note: please perform in advance the test whether it actually works for you under Chrome OS. Because even though we refer to this list provided by the original PC/SC-Lite + CCID, there may be some problems with particular devices on Chrome OS (to be precise, only several popular devices from the list were tested and are known to work correctly).