My employer asked me to write software that allows colleagues to digitally sign measurement data (Windows 10). I received a developer kit consisting of a card reader, smart cards and software to assign pins and certificates (https://www.acs.com.hk/en/products/495/evo-pki-kit-pki-software-solution/).
With the software from the smart card company, I was able to add a certificate to a card and to sign with it a PDF via adobe acrobat. But to speed up the measuring-signing-process, my employer would like to skip PDF/acrobat and use own software to put digital-signed measuring data (e.g. as a JSON string, containing the measuring data also as clear text) directly into a SQL database.
The most suited I could find so far is this library: https://github.com/LudovicRousseau/PyKCS11 but it relies on Visual studio 2010 SDK (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VisualStudioProductTeam.VisualStudio2010SP1SDK), whereby the official Microsoft download for it is no longer available.
As a former engineer/scientist, I have only had experience with Python programming in other areas. Now I am worried to waste time learning unsuitable or outdated libraries. Therefore, I am reaching out to you in hopes that someone has the experience to make languages/libraries/software (or even other hardware) recommendations.
EDIT: in the details of the certificate, which we want to use for digital signing, is written among other things:
- signature algorithm: "sha256RSA"
- signature hash algorithm: "sha256"
- public key: "RSA (4096 Bits)
EDIT2: I will try https://github.com/LudovicRousseau/pyscard, any other suggestions are still welcome.