This is an attempt at making a PIV (NIST SP 800-73-4) compatible JavaCard applet. Target is JavaCard 2.2.2+, with 1-3k of transient memory.

What works:

• OpenSC, MacOS (piv.tokend for login), Windows PIV

• RSA-1024 and -2048 key generation on card, signing

• EC P-256 and P-384 key generation

• EC Diffie-Hellman on P-256 and P-384

• ECDSA (only when using JavaCard 3.0.4+ builds)

  • JC 2.2.2 builds have a hash-on-card workaround (see below), but this is not standard PIV

• PINs and change of PIN, PUK reset

• Support for both 3DES and AES card administration keys

• Most YubiKeyPIV-compatible extensions are implemented and working:

  • PIN policy

  • Version indicator (we pretend to be a YK5)

  • Fetch serial number (randomly generated)

  • Set management key

  • Import asymmetric key

  • Reset after PIN+PUK blocked

  • Change PIN/PUK retry limits

  • Attestation using slot F9

  • Get metadata (5.3.0)

What doesn’t work:

• YubicoPIV touch policy

  • No standard JavaCard APIs for accessing GPIO or sensors so this is probably not happening.

The pre-built .cap files for each release can be found on the project release page.

You can use the Global Platform command-line tool (gp) to upload the applet to your JavaCard:

Now you have a PIV card ready to initialise. It’s easiest to do the initialisation with the yubico-piv-tool:

Now your PIV token is set up with a self-signed Card Authentication (9e) key. You can generate keys and certificates in the other slots in a similar fashion (remember that most other slots default to requiring a PIN entry, which you have to do with -a verify-pin -a selfsign-certificate …​ when using yubico-piv-tool).

Sample output of yubico-piv-tool -a status:

Default PIN

123456

Default PUK

12345678

Default card administration (9B) key

01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 …​

(This is the default used by Yubikeys, so that the yubico-piv-tool will work with PivApplet.)

Note that if 3DES admin key support is disabled, the default card administration key will be AES-128 instead (with the first 16 bytes of the default 3DES key as its value).

When built for JavaCard 2.2.2, this applet supports an extension for doing ECDSA with hash-on-card, which client software will have to specifically add support for if it wants to use ECDSA signing. As of writing, the only PIV client with support for this extension known to the authors is pivy.

Unfortunately, regular PIV ECDSA signing is not possible with the JavaCard standard crypto functions in JC2.2.2 (it is possible in JC3.0.4 and later, and builds of this applet for 3.0.4 use the standardised method), which only support a single operation that combines hashing and signing. The current PIV standard demands that the data to be signed is hashed by the host, and then the hash is sent to the card.

In addition to the algorithm ID 0x11 for ECCP256, we introduce two new IDs, ECCP256-SHA1 (0xF0) and ECCP256-SHA256 (0xF1). For key generation the client should continue to use ECCP256 (as well as for ECDH), but for signing one of the two new algorithm IDs must be used (ECCP256 will be rejected).

These two new algorithms are "hash-on-card" algorithms, where the "challenge" tag sent by the host to the card should include the full data to be signed without any hashing applied. The card will hash the data and return the signature in the same was as a normal EC signature.

For example, to sign the payload "foo\n" with the Card Authentication (9e) key, with SHA-256, the host could send the following APDU:

This extension, naturally, will not work with existing PIV host software that is not aware of it. It is supported as a workaround for users who are ok with customising their host software who really want to use ECDSA.

Support for these new algorithms is advertised in the 0xAC (supported algorithms) tag in the response to INS_SELECT. Client software may detect it there to decide whether to attempt use hash-on-card or not.

We use ant-javacard for builds.

The capfile will be output in the ./bin directory, along with the .class files (which can be used with jCardSim).

You can also download pre-built capfiles from the releases page here on GitHub.

The applet can be configured to suit different cards or needs by adjusting the feature flags in build.xml before running ant.

Currently available feature flags:

Tested card configurations:

As of v0.8.0, the builds on the releases page are labelled with these same abbreviations.

Simulator testing for this project has so far been done on Linux, using jCardSim (both with and without a Virtual Smartcard Reader).

The easiest way to do it on Linux is with a virtual reader:

1. Install vsmartcard (see here, but it might also be in your distro’s package manager). Once it’s installed (and PCSCd restarted) your list of smartcard readers on the system (try opensc-tool -l or yubico-piv-tool -a list-readers) should include a bunch of Virtual PCD entries.

2. Clone my fork of jCardSim (https://github.com/arekinath/jcardsim) and build it (using mvn initialize && mvn clean install)

3. From the pivapplet directory (after running ant to build), run: java -noverify -cp bin/:../jcardsim/target/jcardsim-3.0.5-SNAPSHOT.jar com.licel.jcardsim.remote.VSmartCard test/jcardsim.cfg

Now you should see a card appear in the first of the Virtual PCD readers. To start the PivApplet up, send it a command like this:

Then you should see the simulated PivApplet come to life! The forked jCardSim currently spits out debug output on the console including full APDUs sent and received, and stack traces of exceptions (very useful!).

You can also use the simulator with jdb, the Java debugger: