The Problem: A Smart Card Has No Touch Button
Every FIDO2 and WebAuthn sign-in includes a user-presence check: the security key has to prove that a person, not background software, approved the sign-in. A plug-in security key answers it with a small touch button. A smart card has nothing to touch. On a contactless reader or a phone the card answers by being tapped, but in an ordinary contact reader the only gesture the computer recognises is taking the card out of the slot and putting it back in — once for every sign-in. That is slow, it wears the card contacts and the reader, and the card is out of the reader exactly when it is needed.
The Innovation: Electronic Extraction and Reinsertion on One Button Press
US 12,775,811 B1, granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on 27 October 2026, protects a smartcard reader with a user-actuated input mechanism — a button — that, on a single press, makes the host see the card removed and reinserted while the card never physically moves. On input the reader gates the card supply voltage off, drives the card-presence line to “absent” and then back to “present”, and restores power, so the card regenerates its answer-to-reset (ATR). The host therefore registers a genuine removal-and-reinsertion event and treats the user-presence check as satisfied, while the card stays in the slot for the next sign-in. The reader hardware is a standard USB CCID device; the inventive contribution is the Cryptnox firmware that turns one button press into that protocol-level sequence.
What the Granted Claims Cover
The patent issued with twenty claims in three independent categories, all allowed at full as-filed scope. Claim 1 covers the apparatus — a reader with a housing, input mechanism, connector, microcontroller, power-gating circuitry and card-presence detection circuitry, configured to simulate extraction and reinsertion without physically removing the card, conditional on user input. Claim 13 covers the corresponding method — receive the user-input signal, disable power, drive the presence signal absent then present, restore power and cause a fresh ATR while the card stays inserted. Claim 20 covers the same steps as instructions on a non-transitory computer-readable medium. Dependent claims add the controlled power cycle, the ordered four-step sequence, a programmable delay, the ATR trigger, the input-mechanism genus and a redundant fallback circuit. The examiner allowed the claims over the cited art as silent on simulating extraction and reinsertion, conditional on user input, by power-gating combined with presence-signal manipulation.
What This Enables: FIDO2 User-Presence Without Pulling the Card
A Cryptnox FIDO2 smart card fits in a wallet, taps any NFC phone and works with contactless readers. At a desk, many users prefer a contact reader that stays plugged in — which until now meant a card pull for every sign-in. With Click-to-Tap the card stays in the reader and the sign-in takes one press, so the same card works well on the phone and at the computer: less wear on the card and connector, a faster sign-in, and no extra software on Windows, where the reader uses the smart-card support already built into the operating system. The button only answers the presence check; the card’s PIN still protects it, and every key stays inside the card — the reader holds no keys and signs nothing.
Why This Matters
Click-to-Tap closes the last usability gap for FIDO2 on contact readers without weakening the security model. With this US patent granted, Cryptnox holds protected technology for the reader feature across three jurisdictions — the United States patent US 12,775,811 B1, the registered German utility model DE 20 2025 108 028 U1 and the Austrian utility model GM 55114/2025 — all in the name of the inventor, Sébastien Armleder. The full specification and the granted claims can be downloaded above.
