macDNIe

macdnie.com is a macOS app that reads the Spanish electronic ID card — the DNIe — from a USB smart-card reader, and uses it to authenticate at government portals and to sign documents.

It exists because the official DNIe tooling on macOS is awkward. macDNIe is designed to interoperate with AutoFirma rather than replace it, and to explain itself when something goes wrong instead of failing with a cryptic error.

What it does

• Reads the card on-device — detects insertion, opens the card’s CWA-14890 secure channel, and with your PIN shows the full identity record and holder photograph. Supports DNIe generations 1.0 through 4.0.
• Signs in at sedes electrónicas — Safari, Chrome and Edge through native macOS CryptoTokenKit; Firefox through a bundled PKCS#11 module.
• Signs documents — PAdES, CAdES and XAdES with the full certificate chain, an optional RFC-3161 timestamp, and an optional visible signature stamp.
• Validates already-signed documents.
• Recovers from the usual failures — detects a blocked PIN or expired certificates and explains exactly what to do, rather than showing an error code.

Privacy

There is no server and no account. The PIN travels encrypted inside the card’s own secure channel and never leaves the Mac. The only outbound connections are the OCSP revocation check and, if you enable it, the timestamp authority.

Tech stack

A Rust workspace does the real work — APDU transport, the CWA-14890 handshake, secure messaging, PKCS#15 certificate parsing and X.509 — split into crates for the core engine, a daemon, a CLI, the PKCS#11 module and the CryptoTokenKit extension. The interface is a Tauri v2 shell over plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no framework and no build step. Smart-card access goes through TKSmartCard on macOS.

The app speaks the four co-official languages of Spain — Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Galician — with native translations rather than machine output. The website adds English, for five in total.

Status

Version 1.0 is in review on the Mac App Store and is not yet available to download. Two editions are planned: a Mac App Store build, and a notarized direct download that additionally ships the Firefox PKCS#11 module.

Built and operated by Nexo Apex SL.