smartcard aims to become the standard support library for smart-card development on ruby. Right now, the project offers a PC/SC binding that is working on ruby 1.8, under Linux, OSX, and Windows. Future plans include a high level abstraction for the PC/SC binding (plus any other bindings people need), and an interface for Java cards.

Installation

gem install smartcard

Windows

Select the win32 gem.

OSX

Install the Developer Tools to get gcc. Requires Tiger or Leopard.

UNIX

You need a PC/SC provider. See the BUILD file

for details. The file also contains package lists for popular distributions.

Documentation

The documentation you see was generated with RDoc. If you install the smartcard gem, you should be able to use ri to see the documentation. If you’re using the SVN version, you can rake doc to build the HTML documentation yourself.

License

smartcard is released under the MIT license. This means you’re free to do whatever you want with it. However, it’d be nice to let the developers know if you plan to include this in a distribution (bragging rights are always good). The LICENSE file has the license in legalese.

Acknowledgements

smartcard is developed by Victor Costan while working as a Research Assistant for MIT, under Prof. Srini Devadas, in the Trusted Computing group.

The work is funded by a grant from Quanta Computer Inc, under the T-Party Project.

Kevin Redon <[email protected]> provided information and a failing test case for ATR-based protocol detection, which is necessary if the PC/SC driver doesn’t do it automatically.