Nice talk at FOSDEM, donation of Feitian PKI smarcards

[Jean-Michel Pouré <jmpoure free fr>]

Hi Steff and team,

Nice talk at FOSDEM. Very convincing.

Just a quick note to let you know that we offer free Feitian PKI
smartcards to the community to support your projects:
http://www.gooze.eu/feitian-pki-free-software-developer-card

Just one remark about usability:

This is very nice to handle trust using PKCS#11 smartcards. But no
existing framework takes care of initializing smartcards. It seems like
ever project would like to avoid this kind of issue.

This is done simply by:
pkcs15-init -E ;
pkcs15-init --create-pkcs15 --profile pkcs15+onepin
--use-default-transport-key --pin 0000 --puk 111111 
--label "François Pérou"

Now that pcscd is running from HAL, you may be able to detect the
presence of a smartcard, display a card or a token in Gnome desktop and
propose to initialize it. This is a real issue.

Same as for PIN locking, unlocking, which needs to be handled by a GUI.
I would prefer in Gnome directly.

A quick ducumentation is available here:
http://www.gooze.eu/howto/smartcard-quickstarter-guide

A last note about Gnomint CA manager, which interface is cool:
http://gnomint.sourceforge.net/

It should rely more on OpenSSL and could be a nice candidate to be
included in Seahorse to manage certificates. But this is no priority.
Initializing smartcards and token is much more important.

Keep-up the good thinks

Kind regards,