Jakub Jelen

During last year, we worked hard to make cryptographic tokens usage consistent across the operating system and to improve its usability, mostly using the means of PKCS#11 URIs. This was done for both administrators and end users, in the end resulting in easier configuration of HSMs and authentication using smart cards and cryptographic tokens.

I will outline what we worked on to improve the user experience and support for smart cards, cryptographic tokens and HSMs across the operating system. I will share experience with implementing or improving this support across various applications, libraries and tools, experience with testing them and making sure they work together in Linux distribution. I will focus on the current state in Fedora and RHEL 8 and propose some future steps that we have yet to take.

Do you want to know how Smart Cards can help you improve security and work efficiently? Smart cards are among us for decades, but they are still not widely used on daily basis by most of us, even though they provide significant advantages for both security and usability and all the tools are open source in Linux. Smart cards are no longer only credit-card sized cards, but also more practical USB dongles which are frequently combined with other features such as OTP or U2F, which can take this even further. I will go through architecture of smart cards and show you how they can be used to simplify your work.

• Anatomy of Smart Card and software using it
  • project OpenSC
• Practical examples
  • Atomic operations with OpenSC tools
  • Using smart cards with high-level tools such as OpenSSH, Firefox
  • Debugging Smart Cards problems