hofill/rocei_cli

This is a command-line tool that lets people with a Romanian national eID card (ROeID) digitally sign PDF files and other documents on macOS or Linux, without needing the official IDPlugManager software that Romania's government provides. It works by talking directly to the smart card chip over PC/SC, which is the standard protocol most computers use to communicate with physical smart cards. The private key that proves your identity stays inside the chip at all times and never gets copied to your computer. The project has three parts: a low-level module that makes the card behave like a standard signing device (PKCS#11, a common interface that many applications already support), a command-line program for everyday tasks like listing card contents, reading your identity data, and signing files, and a Python script that handles PDF-specific signing including placing a visible stamp on a page. For PDFs, you can choose where the signature stamp appears by running a command that opens a browser tab and lets you drag a box to the spot you want. Non-PDF files get a compact signed token instead, a short text string that records the filename, a hash of the file contents, a timestamp, and a digital signature. Installation on macOS goes through Homebrew, a package manager that handles the build steps for you. On Linux, you need a handful of development libraries installed first and then build from source. The author notes that Linux and Windows builds were produced with AI assistance and have not been tested against real hardware, so macOS is the only verified platform at this time. The legal section explains that the code was written from scratch by studying the behavior of the official library, without copying any proprietary source code, under an EU directive that permits reverse engineering for interoperability purposes.