Re: using polkit

On Mon, 2014-01-06 at 10:44 +0100, Ludovic Rousseau wrote:

> I guess you only have PKCS#15 cards with default (known) transport keys.

Indeed.

> >> If you want to avoid a remote user to use a PIN protected card the
> >> best is to use a pinpad reader with a firewall. The PIN will only be
> >> entered using the pinpad. Any PIN verification command will be
> >> rejected by the reader firewall.
> >
> > Or I can use polkit :) The latter requires no additional hardware and is
> > already used for access control (to access hard disks) in most systems.
> >
> > In general administrating a system doesn't always imply selection of the
> > authenticating tokens. Typically the tokens are fixed and the
> > administrator tries to make the best use of the system access controls
> > to prevent misuse. In 99% of the cases a smart card is used
> > interactively from the guy sitting on the PC and currently there is no
> > way to enforce that.
> OK. PolKit may solve some some problems in some cases.
> My concern is: what default security policy should be provided by pcsc-lite?
> To _not_ break existing system the default configuration should be:
> access allowed for any process.
> Can we propose something better than that?

The example file I submitted had as rule, that the console user has full
access, as well as the administrator user. I can modify that to have the
existing pcsc-lite policy of allowing everyone (just change auth_admin
with yes in the policy). 

I've also made the polkit support optional (--with-polkit needs to be
explicitly specified), so someone enabling it will be most probably
installing his own policies. I could add some README file that explains
few things with polkit. Let me know for that.

regards,
Nikos