German ID Cards

Germany has several laws for smart cards, and most ID cards conforming to those laws are using the TCOS 2.0X card operating system.

Both a TeleSec and a SignTrust card were successfully tested with OpenSC 0.10.0-beta. Pkcs11-tool will fail on the signature only key, because it tries to do raw rsa for signing and the key does not support that. Applications should be fine, unless they try raw rsa padding with signature keys.

You can find more information about TCOS cards here.

Support for D-Trust cards is in OpenSC 0.11.1 and later.

Datev has also a Trustcenter in Germany, but we don't know what cards they use, as they only hand out cards to tax accountants etc (Steuerberater). Heise reports Datev will close their Trustcenter and hand over that business to Deutsche Post / SignTrust.

German eHBA, eGK

It is planned that in 2006 all german physicians and apothecaries will be equipped with a smartcard, the so called eHBA (elektronischer Heilberufeausweis). After that all german citizens that are a member of a public health insurance company (gesetzliche Krankenkasse) will get a similar card, the so called eGK (elektronische Gesundheitskarte). This means that virtually every german citizen will have a smartcard soon.

I don't have enough informations about these cards to make OpenSC support them. If you do have any such information, please let us know or add a link to the list below:

Information about the future german eHBA / eGK: