[Pcsclite-muscle] HELP! Any experience on smart card chip wearing?

[Umberto Rustichelli]

First of all, thanks everybody for the prompt help.
Maybe I should first notice that we ran a test with >2 million 
signatures befre going into production but with different cards: we 
could not test the customer's cards because we don't have them. The 
family is InCard but cards families are so... crowded...

On 09/08/2014 10:02 AM, helpcrypto helpcrypto wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 9:30 AM, Umberto Rustichelli <
> umberto.rustichelli at gt50.org> wrote:
>
>>   ...a few millions consecutive signatures for each card (what you wouldn't
>> do to meet the absurd customers' demand!)...
>> To make it short, does anybody know of any predictable limit that can
>> cause failures (after "many" signatures the *cards disconnect*, one by one)
>> among the following:
>>
>> - cards cannot reliably work for more than N signatures
>>
> If it's a chip-writing limit issue, the card shouldnt be able to write
> after reconnect. Have you tried that?
>
> - some counters in the PCSC / CCID code
>
> You can try stopping pcscd service and powering off devices each x-million
> operations to discard this.
>
> - any known issue with smart card drivers,
>
> I dont know how you doing, but I suggest doing independent operations (ie:
> use establishContext/releaseContext)

Mmmm... this I cannot do because I'm relying on the proprietary driver 
for PKCS#11 operations, and I think that there is no reliable 
open-source driver for those smart cards, sorry!

> Whats the current operation limit?
> Perhaps the amount of operations done is much more clarifying for us.
> Consider, for example, PCSC dwCurrenStatus has a limit of bits to notify
> card changes (including card resets).