Monotonic Counter Objects

Monotonic counter objects represent hardware counters that exist on the device. Also:

>The value of the counter is guaranteed to increase by 1 each time it is read.

>The monotonic counter is supported only on soft (non-smart card based) tokens and the value of the counter on each different token is the same. 

>There is only one monotonic counter per token.

>The monotonic counter is automatically created whenever a token is initialized and exists by default on the Admin Token.

>The value is interpreted as a 160-bit big-endian binary integer (MSB on left).

>The Token SO may change the count value by setting the CKA_VALUE attribute.

Table 1: Monotonic Counter Attributes

Attribute	Data Type	Meaning
CKA_RESET_ON_INIT1	CK_BBOOL	The value of the counter will reset to a previously returned value if the token is initialized using C_InitializeToken.
CKA_HAS_RESET1	CK_BBOOL	The value of the counter has been reset at least once at some point in time.
CKA_VALUE	Byte Array	The current version of the monotonic counter. The value is returned in big endian order. This value must be 20 bytes in size. Any attempt to set a value less than 20 bytes will fail.

¹ Read Only. The CKA_VALUE attribute may not be set by the client.