OS X El Capitan and smart cards: known bugs

El Capitan: OS X 10.11

In Yosemite (OS X 10.10) Apple rewrote a large part of the smart card infrastructure and introduced many bugs. I made a list in "OS X Yosemite and smart cards: known bugs".

I propose to maintain a similar lists for smart card bugs found in El Capitan10.11.x.

The bugs I find in El Capitan may also be present in Yosemite. The bugs may not be specific to El Capitan.

Bug list

  1. PC/SC is not unusable after fork()
  2. SCardBeginTransaction() returns different error codes than on GNU/Linux and Windows

Fixed in 10.11.5

  1. OS X El Capitan and CCID driver upgrades
    see OS X El Capitan 10.11.5 and CCID driver fix

Fixed in 10.12.0 (Sierra)

  1. Connecting a CT700 Gemalto smart card reader renders PC/SC useless
  2. SCardGetAttrib() returns SCARD_E_NOT_TRANSACTED when it should not
  3. SCardConnect() returns SCARD_E_PROTO_MISMATCH instead of SCARD_E_SHARING_VIOLATION
  4. SCardGetAttrib() returns SCARD_E_NOT_TRANSACTED instead of SCARD_E_INSUFFICIENT_BUFFER

Fixed in 10.13.0 (High Sierra)

  1. SCARD_W_RESET_CARD not returned by SCardTransmit()

Feature list

  1. SCardGetStatusChange() and number of card events
  2. SCardGetStatusChange() and "\\?PnP?\Notification"
  3. add support of TAG_IFD_POLLING_THREAD_WITH_TIMEOUT

Conclusion

Apple still has some PC/SC bugs to fix.