Programming CryptoCard KT-1 Tokens Using a Windows Platform

20070501: As of May, 2007, the contact at CryptoCard for the distribution of software development kits is Bill LaHam (Bill's current e-mail address is bill@cryptocard.com, but will probably be changing to bill.laham@cryptocard.com).

Bill sent me the software development kits for both Linux and Windows.  (The version number of the Windows SDK was 1.3.)  Each SDK was packaged as a .ZIP file.  For my application, the Windows SDK was used only for token initialization and the Linux SDK was used only for token authentication.

The Windows token initialization functionality was packaged as a .COM object, and the example software was written in Microsoft Visual Basic.

The token initialization functionality in the example program packaged with the SDK worked nearly exactly as expected.  The only difficulty encountered was that the instructions in the SDK did not indicate that a driver for the token initializer needs to be installed.  (This driver is contained in the file libusb0.sys in the SDK.)  If the driver isn't installed, the Visual Basic example program fails with an unhandled memory exception at the Initialize() function call.

The steps to initialize a KT-1 token using a Windows platform and the SDK example program are:

• Plug in a USB initializer and direct Windows to the libusb0.sys file as the driver (this needs to be done only once Windows should thereafter remember which driver is associated with the initializer).
• Modify the included example Visual Basic program for KT-series tokens.  (This involves changing "R" to "K" at several locations in the program.  These locations are obvious.)
• Remove the breakpoints in the Visual Basic program so that the program flows directly through quickly to the token initialization.
• Set up the KT-1 token for programming.  (From a token that is off, press and hold the control button and release it when the Init message appears; then press the control button again so that the RDY 4 IR message appears.)
• Insert the token into the initializer.
• Run the Visual Basic example program.

Bill LaHam also sent me a Java application that provides a GUI to initialize tokens (screen snapshot below).  This worked quite well.  It was very easy to copy and paste random keys (provided, for example, by this page) into the Java application and to initialize tokens.  In my application, the Java application proved to be the best token initialization method.

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