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Smart Card Driver Environment

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The following figure shows the standard environment for the smart card reader driver.

diagram illustrating the standard environment for the smart card reader driver.

In addition, the figure shows the following components of the smart card environment:

  • Applications communicate with a smart card reader driver by means of the smart card resource manager. The reader driver resides in kernel space, and the smart card resource manager resides in user space.

  • The resource manager communicates with the reader driver by means of I/O controls that are dispatched using the DeviceIoControl system call. For information about how to use the DeviceIoControl system call, refer to the DeviceIoControl topic in the Microsoft Windows SDK.

    Likewise, smart card-aware applications can send instructions to a smart card reader driver by means of DeviceIoControl, and the operating system will forward the indicated IOCTL to the reader driver. If the reader driver is a WDM driver, the operating system will forward the request by means of an I/O request packet (IRP).

  • Microsoft supplies one reader driver sample, pscr.sys, which is a driver for a PCMCIA smart card reader. The source code for this driver is available in the collection of WDK samples. For further information, see PCMCIA Smart Card Driver. Vendors of smart card reader devices must supply drivers that are designed to work with the system-supplied resource manager and smart card driver library.

  • Both native and vendor-supplied reader drivers must use the smart card driver library to perform many of their key operations, as explained in the section, Smart Card Driver Library.