Introduction
============

The *Smart Card Middleware API* is part of the *Idopte Smart Card Middleware* product, which provides standard interfaces for accessing smart cards or cryptographic tokens from applications (PKCS#11 library, Microsoft CSP and smart card mini-driver, Apple TokenD and CryptoTokenKit token driver, ...).

Idopte has developed a novel and independent solution to provide means, from a React-Native application, to manipulate and use keys, certificates, and other cryptographic objects stored in smart cards (or other hardware cryptographic devices). The goal is to provide access to these low-level elements through a simple JavaScript API callable from the application.

This API does not, however, provide higher-level functionalities generally required for PKI, like X.509 / PKCS#7 / general ASN.1 encoding and decoding, or software cryptographic algorithm implementations. These functionalities can easily be added by using pure-JavaScript libraries provided by third-parties (like `Forge <https://github.com/digitalbazaar/forge>`_, `PKI.js <https://pkijs.org/>`_, and others).

.. toctree::
    :hidden:

    architecture
    functions