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Elias
Asked: 2019-06-26 02:40:07 +0800 CST

Does the SConnect Firefox extension work in Ubuntu?

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SConnect is a browser extension (made by a company called Gemalto) that makes it possible for web pages to use security devices (e.g. a card reader) connected to the computer.

According to this page https://aginsurance.mobileconnect.gemalto.com/sconnect/faq/#compatibility SConnect is supposed to work for Firefox in Linux. But for me, it is not working.

The installation is supposed to be fairly automatic, when you go to a web page that uses SConnect it detects that SConnect is not installed and asks if you want to install it. I follow the installation steps but when trying the web page again it still acts as if SConnect was not installed. Firefox shows the SConnect extension as installed but "inactive".

In my case I need SConnect in order to use an electronic identification system that the Swedish tax agency is using (you insert smartcard in card reader to login), but I think SConnect is used in other contexts as well, also in other countries. SConnect works in Windows 10 but I need it to work in Linux, preferably in Ubuntu.

Steps to reproduce the problem: in Firefox, go to https://skatteverket.se/ and click the "Logga in" button in the top-right corner, then click "AB Svenska Pass". At that point, the SConnect extension is supposed to be activated if it is installed, or you are asked if you want to install it. That works properly in Windows 10, but in Ubuntu it always asks to install the extension again, even if it was already installed.

This is in Ubuntu 19.04 using Firefox 67.0.4 and SConnect version 2.10.0.0.

I have tried using the Chrome browser instead (Chrome should also work according to the compatibility info link above) but that behaves in the same way.

I suppose that ideally this problem should be reported to the company (Gemalto) and they should fix it, I have tried but so far I have not been able to get any meaningful answer from them. So I decided to try asking a question here hoping that someone else has faced this problem and perhaps solved it.

Can the SConnect Firefox extension work in Ubuntu, and if so, are some special tricks needed to make it work?

firefox smartcard 19.04

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It turns out that the current version (SConnect 2.10.0.0) works in Ubuntu 18.04 but it does not work out-of-the-box for Ubuntu 19.04 due to different versions of some libraries that are needed.

    In Ubuntu 19.04 it can be fixed as follows:

    First, to troubleshoot we can try running the executable sconnect_host_linux (included in the sconnect-host-v2.10.0.0.tar.gz file that was downloaded by the SConnect installation attempt) manually from the command-line to see what goes wrong:

    ./sconnect_host_linux
./sconnect_host_linux: error while loading shared libraries: libcrypto.so.1.0.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

    Alternatively we can use ldd to list the libraries that are not found:

    ldd sconnect_host_linux | grep "not found"
libcrypto.so.1.0.0 => not found
libssl.so.1.0.0 => not found

    The libraries libcrypto.so and libssl.so do exist in Ubuntu 19.04 but as newer versions; the problem is that the binary executable sconnect_host_linux needs the old versions.

    To make it work, we can find the old versions of those library files (e.g. locate libcrypto.so.1.0.0 shows it sitting in some /snap/ directories) and put them some directory e.g. $HOME/sconnect_libs, then add that library path to /etc/ld.so.conf.d/sconnect.conf and finally do sudo ldconfig to make the new configuration active. After that, SConnect works also in Ubuntu 19.04.

    Thanks to @Fabby whose suggestions helped solve this.

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