The pcscd daemon on Mac OS X has a number of known bugs. In particular we encountered the problem described below

(direct quote from http://www.opensc-project.org/sca/wiki/LeopardBugs):

Cards declaring T=0 and T=15 protocols will be configured by pcscd as T=1. This is documented with SetCOS 4.4.1 (ATR: 3B 9F 94 80 1F C3 00 68 11 44 05 01 46 49 53 45 31 C8 07 90 00 19). With some readers (ACR38U), the card simply doesn’t answer to any APDU.

We have created a version of the ccid driver which works around this problem by limiting the number of reported protocols to 1. This forces pcscd to use the first supported protocol declared in the ATR by modifying the file atr.h

BEFORE

#define ATR_MAX_PROTOCOLS 7/* Maximun number of protocols */

AFTER

#define ATR_MAX_PROTOCOLS 1/* Maximun number of protocols */

You can download the patched driver here. Please disconnect any smart card reader before starting the installation procedure

To uninstall the patch open the terminal and enter the following command:

sudo rm -rf /usr/libexec/SmartCardServices/drivers/atrworkaround-ifd-ccid.bundle

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