Cross platform Java Applet for Signing with a Smart Card

Question

I'm trying to validate a smart card. I read this tutorial , and everything is working. But I'm working in a big project, that will be used by a lot of companies, different smart cards and different OS.

My problem: There is a driver that supports all smart cards (A1 and A3) manafucturers? Because this example is using the manufacturer's driver in hardcode, with this line:

library = c:\windows\system32\pkcs201n.dll

There is a way to load a generic library, that support differents manufacturers and differents operating systems?

Answer 1

Each hardware vendor provides their own PKCS#11 driver for their particular device. While PKCS11 is a generic interface, different implementations have different requirements in the set of object attributes and in other function parameters. So creation of universal drivers is not possible. Your software needs to ask the user for a path to the driver DLL.