Java smart card access using middleware

Question

I am working on migration of an old project to Java, and I am having some issues regarding smart card access. Due to lack of documentation I am forced to find my own way through this one, so I hoped you people can help me.

I have a smart card and a dll library (middleware) that was used to gain access to cards functions. Using dependency walker I managed to get a list of functions that dll library holds, and that list sums up to Microsoft Smart Card Api functions. I was wondering if there is some native wrapper that enables me to call that functions from Java?

Regarding the nature of smart card, it should contain cryptography functions (PKCS#11), but I wasn't able to instantiate a sun.security.pkcs11.SunPKCS11 provider because of this error:

Caused by: java.io.IOException: The specified procedure could not be found.
     at sun.security.pkcs11.wrapper.PKCS11.connect(Native Method)

Any guideline will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance

UPDATE:

For anyone having this problem as well, it turns out that my smart card doesn't support PKCS11 and I don't have appropriate PKCS11 dll.

As you may have found out by now, Microsoft uses a different API than PKCS#11 for crypto libraries. — Maarten Bodewes
yes that was a rude awakening :) but this problem still remained unresolved — Slobodan
Did you look at the MSCAPI provider to see if that is applicable? Sorry, just looking through the backlogs... — Maarten Bodewes
yes MSCAPI provider is applicable when dll library (minidriver) is correctly programmed. After some strugle I found out that minidriver is not working well, so only way I could use it is by directly calling WIN CAPI, making me write some c++ code and bridge it to java.. — Slobodan

mstred mstred · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-18T21:23:29

Well, I recently worked in a project which used to have Smart Card access for PKI Certificates and there we had the help from these two frameworks:

The Legion of BouncyCastle Java API (for PKI method abstractions) http://www.bouncycastle.org/java.html
IAIK JCE PKCS11 Wrapper (for generic .dll smart card access) http://jce.iaik.tugraz.at/sic/Products/Core-Crypto-Toolkits/PKCS_11_Wrapper

I think that the second option shall be something that might help you too.

Java smart card access using middleware

1 Answers