Dear PC/SC-Lite community, Recently Ludovic created a branch in the repository in which to place a new version of PC/SC-Lite (spun off of PC/SC-Lite 1.3.2), which I've been working on for the past year or so, adapting it for increased scalability and security, as previously discussed on this mail list.
The overarching objective was to make PC/SC-Lite adaptable to more kinds of environments. My specific task was to ensure that these new abstractions would be compatible with Solaris Trusted Extensions, and with the Sun Ray thin client platform. Over the course of development, the design evolved from the proposal initially posted to this list. However, it works now and is being used in production. This code has had exposure, use and feedback from customers, including some larger installations, and has undergone some quality assurance testing. Thus the new code has been proven viable. The new implementation has been checked-in into the following branch and can be browsed and diff'd online: http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/pcsclite/branches/Solaris/ Documentation for this branch is provided in these files: SECURITY_SCALABILITY_ENHANCEMENTS.pdf Design document README.build Build instructions BUGS.txt Issues/TO DO WHAT THIS BRANCH DELIVERS: This workspace currently constructs a Solaris 10 compatible package "SolarisPCSC" for SPARC and i386. That package installs the new PC/SC-lite framework, providing basic components and infrastructure to support using Smart Card readers associated with local consoles (X-Windows) on a UNIX-like system. It can be extended for other environments by providing additional configuration files and plugins. A package called "SUNWpcscdtu", soon to be on Sun's download center, contains plugins for SolarisPCSC, provisioning PC/SC-Lite to work with Sun Ray thin clients, specifically to use smart card readers internal to Sun Ray desktop units, as well as USB readers connected to them upon installation of the CCID IFD handler. The SUNWpcscdtu package compliments the SUNWpcsc package, which is currently identical to SolarisPCSC. SUNWpcsc will be posted at Sun's download center, though ultimately we'd rather be working from the open source distribution of PC/SC-Lite; therefore, it is my hope that ultimately these architectural changes will be merged into the trunk to meet the community goals and the needs of users. BACKGROUND: This implementation was designed modularly, with platform neutrality a primary goal. It was designed to be as flexible and extensible as could be managed, including providing a new plugin interface for user and resource validation and authentication, as well as offering an extensible command-line interface providing backward-compatible modes as well as new operational modes, such as a launcher/instance model. Along the way, a few bugs in in 1.3.2 were found and fixed. These were discovered by scaling PC/SC-lite for multi-user use and stress testing under a somewhat rigorous test matrix. Some of these bugs, previously reported to the mail list may have already been fixed in 1.4.x. The ones that come to mind are a very elusive memory leak, a race condition, a minor incompatibility of SCardStatus() to the PC/SC spec, and also the way status bits are set in SCardGetStatus(). To help people diagnose issues with PC/SC-Lite, a set of tools will be posted this month on Sun's software download center along side the PC/SC-Lite "1.1" distribution. Among these is a tool that interposes between a client and libpcsclite.so and dereferences arguments and formats and logs transactions. Another utility allows a reader list to be pruned to nudge client applications to select the proper reader among a plurality, and yet another provides a means to externally induce a regression in SCardStatus() that at least one 3rd party middleware product actually required at one point to function properly. NOTES ON MERGING WITH TRUNK: Given deadline pressure and scope of the effort, Solaris-specific code crept in. I suspect a few system calls weren't wrapped in platform-independent abstractions in the manner set forth in 1.3.2, but some are. It shouldn't take too much work to clean that up. Beyond ensuring backward-compatibility (autoconf build modes and daemon run modes), and tidying up platform-independent abstractions, I expect that merging the new code with the scores of open source changes made between 1.3.2 and 1.4.x will be the brunt of the unification effort, because there are significant architectural changes in this branch that involve several new source files as well as substantial changes to existing source files. Still, I believe the benefit outweighs the burden. BUILDING: The workspace in this branch was retrofitted (ie. flattened and simplified) from a workspace used to build it for production. It currently only builds on Solaris and is pre-configured to build with one particular set of options (see README.build), so the approach to building is a little different than what one normally sees with an open source project, but not in a huge way. And for a system that has the PC/SC headers, compilers, autoconf/automake tools installed, as well as and Solaris companion software, building packages from source only takes a couple of minutes after download. The autoconf model is adhered to, so it shouldn't be too difficult to forge it back into a more typical distribution build model. The code is put back initially in a this form in order to leap the hurdle of getting it into the repository after being used in a production environment. CONCLUSION: I look forward to discussing this with the community to arrive at a PC/SC-Lite with increased functionality and adaptability that meet the needs of more users. Thanks! Paul PS: Special thanks to Ludovic for allowing me to post the code to a branch in the repository. _______________________________________________ Muscle mailing list Muscle@lists.musclecard.com http://lists.drizzle.com/mailman/listinfo/muscle
