Mac OS X Mountain Lion and smart card status

Ludovic Rousseau

2012-08-02 10:16

The new version of Mac OS X 10.8 called Mountain Lion is now available since July 25th 2012.

Mac OS X Mountain Lion

As I did with the previous major version of OS X Lion I will list changes in Mountain Lion regarding the smart card world.

pcsc-lite

Same as in Lion.

CCID driver

Same as in Lion.
CCID driver version 1.3.11.

Source code

The source code is provided by Apple from the web site Mac OS X 10.8 Source. The two components are available in:

The source code is not yet available in the subversion repository of the SmartCard Services project.

Changes

In Lion 10.7 the versions were 55000 for both SmartCardServices and SmartcardCCID.

So in Mountain Lion the CCID driver has not changed.

The SmartCardServices component (mainly pcsc-lite) has marginally changed. The source code is the same and only build files have been updated:

$ diff -ru SmartCardServices-55000 SmartCardServices-55105|diffstat 
 Info-PCSC.plist                             |    2 
 Makefile-exec.installPhase                  |only
 Makefile.installPhase                       |    3 
 SmartCardServices.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj |  939 +++++-----------------------
 config                                      |only
 5 files changed, 194 insertions(+), 750 deletions(-)

Conclusion

Apple has not updated the smart card components in Mountain Lion. No bug or limitation has been fixed. And no new bug have been introduced.

The CCID driver provided (version 1.3.11) has been released on July 2009, 3 years ago. Since this version 97 readers have been added (72% more).