# German ID Cards

Germany has several laws for smart cards. Until 2006 most ID cards conforming to those laws were using the TCOS 2.0X card operating system. One exception was the D-Trust card which was Micardo based.

Both a TCOS-based TeleSec and a SignTrust card were successfully tested with OpenSC 0.10.0. Pkcs11-tool will fail on the signature only key, because it tries differnt kinds of rsa-operations and the signature key can do rsa-signatures only. Most applications work fine, unless they try raw rsa padding with signature keys.

You can find more information about TCOS cards here.

Support for Micardo-based D-Trust cards is in OpenSC 0.11.1 and later.

Datev has a Trustcenter in Germany too. Their cards used to be TCOS-based (at least in 2006). Heise reports Datev will close their Trustcenter and hand over that business to Deutsche Post / SignTrust.

Sparkassenverlag is another trust center in germany. They offer "qualifizierte Signaturkarten" without being an "akkreditierter ZKA". If you know about the legal implications this might have - let us know! A first test showed that OpenSC does not support the S-Trust card of Sparkassenverlag. I don't even know what card operation system is used.

Signature cards with a key length of 1024bit conform to the german signature law only until the end of 2007 (http://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/media/archive/5951.pdf). This forces german trust centers to either use 2048bit cards or use 1024bit cards with certificates that expire by the end of 2007. TCOS 2.0 has support for 1024bit keys only so TCOS based signature cards must use TCOS 3.0 soon.

D-Trust has already changed their cards and now uses CardOS 4.3 instead of Micardo. Deutsche Post made a similar decision. SignTrust cards were TCOS 2.0 based until 2006 and the new 2048bit SignTrust cards will be CardOS 4.3 based too.

# German eHBA, eGK

Sometime in the future all german physicians and apothecaries will be equipped with a smartcard, the so called eHBA (elektronischer Heilberufeausweis). After that all german citizens that are a member of a public health insurance company (gesetzliche Krankenkasse) will get a similar card, the so called eGK (elektronische Gesundheitskarte). This means that virtually every german citizen will have a smartcard soon.

We do have test cards and they are StarCos 3.0 based. So in order to support these kind of eHBA we do need a StarCos 3.0 driver first. If you have information about eHBAs, please let us know or add a link to the list below:

Information about the future german eHBA / eGK:

- Informations about the "elektronische Gesundheitskarte Schleswig-Holstein"
- Informations about the "Heilberufeausweis"
- HPC-Specification V2.1.0 Part1: Commands, Algorithms and Functions of the COS Platform
- HPC-Specification V2.1.0 Part2: HPC Applications and Functions
- HPC-Specification V2.1.0 Part3: SMC Applications and Functions
- HPC Use-Cases