OpenSC

OpenSC provides a set of libraries and utilities to access smart cards. Its main focus is on cards that support cryptographic operations, and facilitate their use in security applications such as mail encryption, authentication, and digital signature. OpenSC implements the PKCS#11 API so applications supporting this API such as Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird can use it. OpenSC implements the PKCS#15 standard and aims to be compatible with every software that does so, too.

See our OverView page for more details.

OpenSC was written by an international team and is licensed as Open Source software under the LGPL license. For a list of all authors and contributers as well as detailed license information see AuthorsAndCredits.

Please note: typical smart cards are completely undocumented and incompatible with all other existing smart cards. Thus please check these lists below, and review each page to find out which specific smart card is supported by opensc.

For programmable java cards: the support is for the card with the specific applet - if you have a different applet on your card, it might not be supported.

National ID Cards

These are pre-initialized read-only cards.

Smart Cards

This is a list of supported cards which can be written to by the user.

USB Tokens

USB tokens usually have writeable smart cards inside.

Miscellaneous

OpenSC forks

Starting Points

Application Support

Developers Corner