Overview

  ACOS5 Software Development Kit

The ACOS5 Cryptographic Smart Card Software Development Kit (ACOS5 SDK) is designed for professional developers who are interested in developing cryptographic PKI applications supporting the ACOS5 Cryptographic Smart Card.

The Development Kit can greatly reduce your R&D time, cost and time-to-market. Your application can be developed over supplied PKCS11 or CSP. Development is facilitated through the use of ACS unique tool - ACS card Tool - it allows you to send commands directly to your any PCSC-compliant smart card reader and cards including ACOS5 cards.

ACOS5 is an advanced cryptographic smart card that fully complies with ISO 7816-1/2/3/4/8/9 and is specially designed for public-key based applications. It is specially designed for enhancing security and performance for RSA public-key cryptographic operations that are essential in smart card PKI, digital signature and high level security requirements. ACOS5 provides up to 32KB EEPROM of secure data storage. Typical applications include payment system, e-banking, e-commerce, stock trading, network security, corporate identity, Microsoft windows logon, PKI application, and cryptographic middleware layers CSP and PKCS11.

DEFINITION (Wikipedia) PKCS#11 is an API, designed to be platform independent, defining a generic interface to cryptographic tokens, such as Hardware Security Module and smart cards.

Since there isn't a real standard for cryptographic tokens, this API has been developed to be an abstraction layer for the generic cryptographic token. The PKCS#11 API defines most commonly used cryptographic object types (RSA keys, X.509 Certificates, DES/TripleDES keys, etc.) and all the functions needed to use, create/generate, modify and delete those objects.

PKCS#11 is largely adopted to access smart cards and HSMs. Most commercial Certification Authority software uses PKCS#11 to access the CA signing key or to enroll user certificates. Cross platform software that needs to use smart cards uses PKCS#11, such as Mozilla Firefox and OpenSSL (using an extension).

The development kit is now priced at only US$119.95