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SCTracer for macOS

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On a Apple Silicon Mac to get a trace the commands from your smart card reader, follow these steps:

  1. Download the file above by clicking Download
  2. In your downloads folder, uncompress SCTracer.zip by double clicking on it.
  3. Drag SCTracer.app to your application folder.
  4. Plug in a USB smart card reader and insert your card. Note that SCTracer does not currently work with Bluetooth or Lightning readers.
  5. Open Terminal in your Utilities folder and run the following command:
/Applications/SCTracer.app/Contents/Resources/pkcs15-tool -cvvvv 2> ~/Desktop/trace.txt

On your desktop, there will be a file called trace.txt. Open this file with TextEdit and verify that it contains more than 50 lines of text. If you see “No smart card readers found” and only a few lines of output, run the steps again but make sure your smart card is inserted into the reader.

Email this support@twocanoes.com.

Note: The file contains the certificate that may contain your name or other personal information. It does not contain the private key, pin, or private credentials used to log into websites.