Ben Bucksch wrote:
>
> Bob Lord wrote:
> > I'll have to ponder this one some more. The CM manages your certs,
> > and the DM manages (among other things) your smart cards. I suppose
> > we could have a "Certificate and Device Manager" by adding a new tab
> > to the current CM called "Devices". Is that what you had in mind?
>
> Yes.
>
> Sorry for being dumb, but the main purpose of smart cards is to hold
> certs, not?
Not necessarily. Some devices only do raw crypto functions and don't
store certs or private keys, others only provide storage for certs and/or
private keys, but do no crypto functions, and still others do both.
The two built-in tokens in the "Internal PKCS#11 module" illustrate that.
One of them provides crypto functions. Period. The other provides access
to the databases (certs and keys).
Some devices are "accelerators" for certain crypto functions, and therefore
you want to make them the default providers of those functions. Some
devices require you to "log in" to them to use them, and they log you out
after a few seconds of inactivity. So, managing "devices" is conceptually
quite different from managing certificates.
> If so, integrating those dialogs would make sense to me.
Alas.
> Even if you keep them separated, the name "Device Manager" is too broad
> IMO. (With "device", I'd think of a graphics card or somesuch.) Maybe
> "Security Device Manager"?
BTW, PSM existed for Communicator 4.x for well over a YEAR before it was
shipped with Mozilla and/or N6. One of its original goals was to be
independent of the browser (or other client application) with which it
was used. That goal seems to have gone away recently.
--
Nelson Bolyard Sun / Netscape Alliance
Disclaimer: I speak for myself, not for Netscape
