Understanding the usage of PKCS

Yesterday afternoon I tried to compile and run a sample program that performs a basic client-server authentication with an eID certificate. However I have been unable to run it correctly.

In order to understand the reason of that error I need to understand really how all this works, but it's not really a piece of cake.



Basically my understanding is the following:

Provider -> Wrapper -> PKCS Module -> eID Card

The provider is a Java interface, the Wrapper is a JNI library that links the provider with its PKCS Implementation of the provider which in turn accesses the eID card and performs the requested operations.

However I have a problem with the wrapper, which doesn't link properly with the PKCS implementation.

Good news is: I found a lot of things to read this week-end in order to have a better understanding of how all this works.

http://jce.iaik.tugraz.at/sic/products/core_crypto_toolkits/pkcs_11_wrapper
http://forum.java.sun.com/forum.jspa?forumID=60&start=0

I also discovered a blog of a guy who works with eID cards and says a lot of useful things on the subject.

http://christophe.vandeplas.com/