OpenSC/OpenSC

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

3078 stars · 847 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

OpenSC is a set of open-source libraries and command-line tools for working with smart cards, focused on cards that perform cryptographic operations. It implements standard smart card APIs including PKCS#11, Windows Smart Card Minidriver, and macOS CryptoTokenKit, enabling use in authentication, email encryption, and digital signatures.

Use cases

• use smart cards for authentication on linux
• sign documents with a smart card on windows
• access pkcs#11 tokens from applications
• manage and inspect smart card contents from the command line
• enable smart card login and email encryption on macos
• integrate cryptographic smart cards into security applications

When to choose

• you need a mature, cross-platform PKCS#11 middleware for cryptographic smart cards
• you want OS-native integration via Windows Minidriver or macOS CryptoTokenKit
• you need command-line tools to manage, initialize, or debug smart cards

When to avoid

• you only need software-based cryptography without hardware tokens
• your smart card is unsupported by OpenSC's driver list
• you need a pure userspace HSM abstraction rather than smart card middleware

Facets

library · maturity active

cryptography security auth sdk cli developer-tools security privacy developer-tools cross-platform windows cross-platform cli smartcard pkcs11 minidriver cryptotokenkit digital-signatures middleware c linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="OpenSC/OpenSC")