The smart card minidriver provides a simpler alternative to developing a legacy cryptographic service provider (CSP) by encapsulating most of the complex cryptographic operations from the card minidriver developer.
A Microsoft-provided class driver is an intermediate driver designed to provide a simple interface between a vendor-written minidriver and the operating system. A minidriver is a hardware-specific DLL that uses a Microsoft-provided class driver to accomplish most actions through function calls, and provides only device-specific controls.
Under WDM, the minidriver registers its associated hardware adapters with the class driver, and the class driver creates a file object to represent each adapter that registers. The minidriver uses the class driver’s device object to make system calls. The class driver is accessed by user-mode clients through WDM Streaming.
