Re: Partnership Seahorse / OpenSC projects on smartcard support

[Stef <stef memberwebs com>]

On 07/19/2010 12:00 AM, Jean-Michel Pouré - GOOZE wrote:
>> Yes, I responded about this separately. But again, such smart cards
>> and/or readers would be a massive boon to the project.
> 
> I replied separately in a private email. I propose that five of your
> developers register for a free card. Then we can send more.

As I said privately, we'll be coordinating these five at GUADEC. But if
anyone wants to put in their bid early to help with smart card
integration into GNOME (and get one of these smart cards from Gooze) let
me know.

> We are looking for a better PKCS#11 support in Gnome:
> * Seahorse should be able to display the available content of a
> smartcard.
> * Seahorse should provide helpers to create RSA keypairs and X.509
> certificates on card or on computer.

Yes, the goal is that it'll be able to display and manage most PKCS#11
modules and thus smart cards.

> * We should be able to encrypt files using the chip of a smartcard, with
> a right click in Nautilus.

Interesting. This may be a bit further down the line... As far as the
format, I'm assuming we would use PKCS#7 for something like this, no?

> If this is done at Gnome-Keyring level, then fine.
> We need more security relying on real cryptographic hardware.
> 
> Smartcards are a superior technology because they are able to compute
> information without displaying secrets. You will never achieve that
> using a secret repository on a computer.

Certainly.

Cheers,

Stef