patients and with colleagues, we are legal advisers, we are ..., we
are who we are and we have secrets, and there are those who want to
know those secrets.

Yes.  And we're also just normal people sharing barbecue recipes with
our friends.  If you're in Texas, then I suppose a barbecue recipe is
considered a national security secret and worth killing to keep private.
In the rest of the country that's just seen as overkill.

It's definitely true that certain industries and people are at high risk
for intrusions and looting.  It's also definitely true that certain
industries and people are at low risk.  Let's not go about saying that
*everyone* is at high risk, because not everyone is.

I do not get your point here. My proposal is to operate the keyring
from a USB stick. What is the difference with operating it from a
smart card?

Exactly what I said.  USB is completely broken as far as security goes.
 A USB device cannot be made secure.  Thumb drives are malware vectors
par excellence, and with some of the recent attacks which work by
exploiting the firmware things get even nastier and harder to defend
against.  If you're concerned about a remote attacker exploiting your
system from afar, you should also be concerned about a remote attacker
rooting your box and exploiting the hell out of your USB stack.

Smart cards work by storing the key in a method where it cannot be read
by the host computer.  Once a key is moved to the smart card, it ceases
to exist as anything other than a black box.  Data can be sent to the
smart card to be decrypted or signed, but the host computer has
literally no access to the cryptographic key stored on the smart card.

In a USB model, an attacker who can compromise your box can easily
acquire your private key: wait for you to plug in the USB dongle and
make a covert copy of your keyring.  In a smartcard model, an attacker
can't easily acquire your private key.

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