VMware Fusion 8 and reading Smartcards in 10.11 El Capitan

[wqcoleman]

Hi,

Has anyone gotten a 10.11 VM to read smart cards under VMWare 8?  I've finally gotten a working 10.11b7 build running on VMWare 8 with the new script posted on the forums, but when I tried to get it to read a smart cards, it would not work.  Has anyone had any success reading a smartcard under a 10.11b7 VM under VMWare 8?

[tracywang]

Hi wqcoleman,

Thanks for using Fusion. Smart card have two options on Fusion, one is shared smart card reader, the other is passthough smart card reader. Which one did you used? When you connect the smart card to the VM, can you open the System Report... from About This Mac and go to USB to see if you see Virtual USB CCID (shared reader) or USB reader. Thanks.

[wqcoleman]

I'm using the passthrough, where I select the USB Card reader, like I have on previous versions of VMWare Fusion.  Once this is done, the reader is slaved to the VM.  That said, I looked under the system report to see if the reader was being seen by the Mac and it is.. (see attached picture).  I think the problem lays in the fact that the drivers for Smartcard are now in a different locale, and this is borking the existing reading of smart cards.  The tokend drivers are now located at /Library/Security/tokend vs. /System/Library/Security/tokend.  We have our own tokend installer, since there is NOT a binary installer available from Apple. 

When plugging in a card, there is NO smartcard read and the keychain is absent of smart cards. 

.

[jfarwell]

Hi wqcoleman,

Can you confirm that this problem does not reproduce on a 10.11b7 native host? I have seen some discussions about the fact that 10.11 seems to have dropped support for a number of smart cards.

[wqcoleman]

Sorry for the late reply?

The support for Smartcards and how they are read inside 10.11 are two different things.  The drivers themselves, which are tokend, are correctly installing into 10.11 and I can see the cards when I'm working on a physical Mac mini, and authenticate.  That said, when I try to read a card inside a VM, I cannot, even when the drivers are installed in the correct locations.  So, the same exact version of 10.11 (GM in this case) running on a Mac Mini can read and authenticate using a Smartcard.  That same build, running in VMWare 8, cannot even see the card in the reader, which leads me to believe that this is a USB "reader" problem and/or the drivers (tokend) are located in a new location and as such, you aren't using them to mount the card within the reader.

[wqcoleman · Accepted solution]

If you change the USB Compatibility to 2.0, you can see the Cards.  If the USB compatibility is set to 3.0, you cannot see the card in the reader.

[jfarwell]

Interesting. That makes it sound like either the smart card reader had some special USB 3.0 behavior or our virtual XHCI controller has a bug.

Could you let us know the make/model of the smart card reader, and maybe we can buy one to test with.

- James

[adriancastillo]

@jfarwell Not sure if someone from VMware will still see this post, I have a reader that works fine in a Windows 7 virtual machine in Fusion but not in a Windows 10 virtual machine. If it helps, I can arrange to send you readers to test compatibility.