Gpg: selecting card failed: Operation not supported by device

Nitrokey Support English
#1

Hello,
After upgrading to OSX Big Sur i get the following issue. Any ideas what I could do to get it to work?
Thanks

gpg --card-status
gpg: selecting card failed: Operation not supported by device
gpg: OpenPGP card not available: Operation not supported by device

gpg --version

gpg (GnuPG) 2.2.27
libgcrypt 1.8.7
Copyright © 2021 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GNU GPL-3.0-or-later https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Home: /Users/xxx/.gnupg
Supported algorithms:
Pubkey: RSA, ELG, DSA, ECDH, ECDSA, EDDSA
Cipher: IDEA, 3DES, CAST5, BLOWFISH, AES, AES192, AES256, TWOFISH,
CAMELLIA128, CAMELLIA192, CAMELLIA256
Hash: SHA1, RIPEMD160, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512, SHA224
Compression: Uncompressed, ZIP, ZLIB, BZIP2

#2

When you open the system report and look for USB devices, can you see your card there ? Would be the first step to understand, if the card reader in general is detected and on the right (0) slot.

Without a card, I get the same messages like you - so might be that the order of readers has changed…

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#3

Yes, the NItrokey device shows up, here is info shown

Nitrokey Pro:

Product ID: 0x4108
Vendor ID: 0x20a0
Version: 1.01
Serial Number: xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Speed: Up to 12 Mb/s
Manufacturer: Nitrokey
Location ID: 0x14310000 / 14
Current Available (mA): 500
Current Required (mA): 100
Extra Operating Current (mA): 0

#4

Could you check what is the result of the following status command?

$ gpg2 --card-status all

It should list all readers’ details. According to this GnuPG ticket it’s possible to select reader but only for this command. Editing is not supported yet - I will ask about current status for this ticket.
In the meantime you could try to disable the other smart card reader.

Edit: A workaround mentioned in the ticket is changing the driver to pcsc, and writing down the device in the scdaemon configuration (details in T1621):

The pcsc driver supports one card reader at a time only, though you can use the “reader NAME” config switch in scdaemon.conf to select the active one.

#5

Thanks, after running your command everything started working. The only thing I can think of is that Big Sur had a driver issue for USB, and the last update (yesterday) fixed that. You can close this issue. Thanks for quick response.

1 Like