I expect the state of open source smart card and tokend implementations to get better and more easily usable on Yosemite so I may only be using the Thursday product for a short time.

This will change but if you are in a hurry (as I was) the best thing you can do in the short term is pay $29.95 for the Thursby PKard software from - it installed seamlessly and allowed me to login via VPN although for some reason my certificates were not passed on to the Windows remote desktop system, hopefully I don’t need the $179 “ADmitMac” product for that. As of the time I wrote this article, the state of freely available open source software for PIV smart card support on Yosemite is pretty lacking. I need to use a HHS PIV card to remotely access computer systems from a brand new Macbook air running OS X 10.10 Yosemite. Still – consider the Centrify software if you don’t want to spend $29. Still no idea why this is happening – on other versions of OS X my smart card credentials transparently passed onto the OS.

Long story short: It works to get past the VPN gateway but throws the same “no valid certificates found” error when trying to login to the Windows desktop via a Citrix Receiver client. I just had a chance to test the new Yosemite 10.10 compatible free SmartCard utility from Centrfy mentioned here: The bulk of this post concerns the $29 Pkard product from Thursby which is the first I found with explicit OS X 10.10 support. If this is bothering or interesting you, you may want to monitor this URL: There is an active Citrix support thread on the “no valid certificates found” issue. Note: This entire post is basically google search bait designed to (hopefully) allow others struggling with the same issues to save a bit of time.

Using PIV smart cards for HHS VPN login with Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite

Install piv card reader on a mac