Bug 163760

Summary: Unrealistic displaying of certificates located on OpenPGP smart cards
Product: [Applications] kleopatra Reporter: Manu Favre <emerald>
Component: generalAssignee: Marc Mutz <mutz>
Status: CLOSED WORKSFORME    
Severity: wishlist    
Priority: NOR    
Version: outdated (old bug dump)   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: unspecified   
OS: Microsoft Windows   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Manu Favre 2008-06-11 08:07:39 UTC 
Version:           1.9.2-beta (svn-812909, 2008-05-26) (using 4.00.80 (KDE 4.0.80 >= (KDE 4.1 Beta1), compiled sources)
Compiler:          i586-mingw32msvc-gcc
OS:                Microsoft Windows (i686) release 5.0 (2000 Professional)

There is in my opinion a large range of possible improvements for the way Kleopatra manages smartcards, here are some of my thinkings (to be completed by community):

- Add in tabs display a user friendly icon for each certificate. The icon should indicate wether the certificate contains or not a private key and wether the certificated is located on the computer or on the smart card.

- Here above mentionned displaying should react dynamically to the insertion of the smart card (i.e. for a certificate xyz stored in a smart card: if smart card present -> display icon of the certificate with smartcard idiom + "private key available", when smart card removed -> display icon of the certificate without smartcard idiom and without "private key available")

- PCSC session: At the moment Kleopatra just tries to access to the first available pcsc reader and gives up with error message "card not present" if the first pcsc reader does not contain an OpenPGP compatible smart card. Actually it is possible anyway to specify the reader that must be choosen in gpg.conf but in my opinion this is a bit boring in some cases. Proposal: spool all available pcsc readers and make a "candidate list" of all reader where an OpenPGP smart card is actually inserted, if the candidate list contains only one candidate then automatically select it. If no candidates found -> Error message "no available card".

- ?
Comment 1 Marc Mutz 2008-06-12 16:49:25 UTC 
Kleopatra doesn't know about smart cards at all. What you're seeing are messages from gpg/gpgsm/scdaemon...

For the first point, we don't get that information from gpgme, so we can't display stuff.

But better smartcard support is definitely something we're interested in. Patches and hardware are welcome :)
Comment 2 Manu Favre 2008-06-13 13:49:49 UTC 
Hi again Mark :o)

I don't know here how to initiate a move on the right direction. I agree that, at least at the moment, all these 
messages are coming from gpg and thus Kleopatra itself cannot influence the smart card management. We could of course 
simply remove my entry on Kleopatra bugs report system and then start a topic on gpg side.
>From the other side, in my opinion it is not necessarily a good idea to assign (and consequently centralise) all 

smartcard related tasks to a piece of software that is external to the front-end application. Typically, the smartcard 
reader initialisation should be made by the front-end itself (what will happen for instance if several front-ends are 
used simultaneously?). I think pcsc was made to manage this kind of things and I don't really see an advantage adding a 
new software-layer. Of course scdaemon should still be used but only to treat the smartcard related objects that 
concerns the certificates, keys and other crypto-objects; so I can imagine that a collaboration between gpg and 
kleopatra communities may be very helpful, but how to initiate it? What's your point of view?

With warmest regards,

Manu Favre

P.S. 
I not familiar in working in an open source environment, so if some of proposals seem strange to you, please be 
understanding :o|


[bugs.kde.org quoted mail]
Comment 3 Marc Mutz 2008-06-17 00:20:25 UTC 
Sure, we're working with the gpg developers, very closely. I'm talking about integrating a button for gpgsm --learn-card and the like, and integrating the scdaemon kicker icon into Kleopatra. But this is outside of the scope of the current work, and I can't hack on it in my free time, since I can't get the smartcard readers in my laptop to work properly :/ But, as I said: We'd be certainly interested in patches.
Comment 4 Manu Favre 2008-06-17 16:17:52 UTC 
Good. Thus I think we can close that topic for the moment. 
I will continue to make myself familiar with the new GPG BETA, try to improve the SC management by myself and then start this topic again within gpp community.