Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker wrote:

In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Fri, 01 Apr 2005 10:14:25 -0600, "Douglas E. 
Engert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:

deengert> The OpenSSL ENGINE facilities had ENGINE_load_private_key,
deengert> and ENGINE_load_public_key, but do not have ENGINE_load_certificate.
deengert> deengert> When the ENGINE is used by an application, such as the
deengert> Heimdal PKINIT code to use a smartcard to get a Kerberos
deengert> ticket the application does not have easy access to the
deengert> certificate stored on the smartcard.


In 0.9.8-dev, there's a potentially better mechanism that I started a
while ago (more than a year), called a STORE, which also comes with
ENGINE support.  However, because of lack of funding, I haven't found
the time to finish up (it's no small project).  I hope to get the
opportunity to feel financially safe enough to be able to finish that
module.  It would make it possible to retrieve (or retreive a handle
to) quite a number of different types of data from any store, smart
cards, SQLite databasees, LDAP repositories and whatnot.

I could add ENGINE_load_certificate(), but that would (hopefully) just
be a temporary solution before the grander solution (yes, I'm boasting
it :-)) is firmly in place.

STORE sound interesting.


deengert> The Heimdal code needs the certificate, as well as the key. deengert> Currently the certificate must be loaded off the card deengert> in a separate step, then passed in as a file.

Hmm, I imagine that ENGINE_load_certificate() would still be a
separate step.  I hope that's not a problem...

Not really, as the OpenSC engine-pkcs11.so "opens" the card once, and keeps it open to fetch the certificate then later sign the hash etc. The ENGINE_load_certificate would be a big step forward.

The overhead I am seeing is having to basicly "open" the card twice
with two seperate programs, pkcs15-tool and kinit. In my case the
pkcs15 emulation code has to test the card, and read the certificate
twice. This extra overhead may be 5 to 20 seconds, which adds a lot to login.
Other cards may have different overhead.

Eventially the code should be called from a heimdal PKINIT PAM
routine, so having it all together would make it much easier.

Hopefully ENGINE_load_certificate is a small project,
and I can help.


Cheers, Richard

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--

 Douglas E. Engert  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
 Argonne National Laboratory
 9700 South Cass Avenue
 Argonne, Illinois  60439
 (630) 252-5444
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