Reader not visible in smart card shell

Nitrokeys HSM
1

I try to use a Nitrokey HSM 2 to store certificates, private keys and public keys. I found the documentation Importing Keys And Certificates - Nitrokey Documentation.

I could create a DKEK share, see Desaster Recovery for your SmartCard-HSM.

However the smartcard shell gui does not show the Nitrokey. sc-hsm-tool returns this information

sc-hsm-tool
Using reader with a card: Nitrokey Nitrokey HSM (DENK04002550000 ) 00 00
Version : 4.1
Config options :
User PIN reset with SO-PIN enabled
SO-PIN tries left : 15
User PIN tries left : 3
DKEK shares : 1
DKEK key check value : E834…

What can I do, to get the Nitrokey working within smartcard shell?

Greets
Jens

2

Hi. What OS are you using? Did you try using elevated permissions like sudo on Linux oder as Administrator on Windows?

Maybe another application is already accessing the HSM.

3

I use linux, I will try with sudo. But why should elevated privileges be needed, if creating the DKEK works without elevated privileges works?

4

Just to rule out one error possibility.

It should work as regular user but there are so many Linux distributions that might need additional configuration that a regular user has access to the token.

In a shell some users tend to switch to root and when a GUI application then runs as regular user there could be one difference that might cause the issue.

5

If the device is working using native commands like sc-hsm-tool, but is not visible in Java applications, then most of the time it is a problem with the Java installation looking for libpcsclite.so at the wrong places.

Try and locate libpcsclite.so.1 on your system and add

-Dsun.security.smartcardio.library=<path_to_lib_location>/libpcsclite.so.1

in scsh3gui.

6

Using the additonal parameter -Dsun.security.smartcardio.library=... seems to have solved the problem.

Thank you very much :slight_smile: