Starting from OSX Sonoma, smart card readers for Mac can fail for the following use cases:
detect card reader
execute transaction (digital signature or authentication)
The general end-user experience is that the smart card communication fails (card reader disseappears or the transaction fails).
A very great shout-out to Ludovic Rousseau who initially did a follow-up on impact of smart card readers in Sonoma:
Reported Bug to Mac OSX:
OSX Forum
Solution
The initial solution prior to 11/2023 was very elaborate, but was made easy by applying a single command in a MAC OSX terminal:
What does the command execute/change?
The command switches the MAC OSX implementation of the CCID drivers to the legacy version (the version working prior to Sonoma).
As MAC OSX defaults using a custom CCID implementation, which still have some issues, switching to the old version is a temporary stolution.
How to roll-back to MAC OSX CCID implementation?
Form a specific moment (not at the time of writing), switching back to the default CCID implementation can be done using the following commands (in a terminal):
Check if the built-in Apple CCID driver is active
If the former command results in:
This means that the built-in Apple driver is active.
The result is 1 so the "external" (non-Apple) CCID driver is enabled.
Returning back to default, execute:
After executing a driver switch, we have noticed that a restart is mandatory!