On Thursday 23 March 2006 07:11, Carlos Henrique Bauer wrote:
> What you are proposing means a developer must trust all the applications
> installed in the machines where its applications will run. That's a lot
> of trust.

Mmmm, no.  That's not what I'm proposing.  You probably jumped into the middle 
of the thread and saw the problems I was complaining about, not my proposed 
solution.

My proposed solution would require the developer to trust users not to run 
applications that misuse the card credentials.

> I believe the only thing someone can reasonably assume is that 
> the OS installed on those machines will prevent any malicious attempt to
> circumvent the protection provided by the smart card middleware and that
> users will not run any evil code as root .

Agreed, with the additional assumption that the OS will not allow other 
(non-root) users to impersonate the card owner (i.e. run applications under 
the owner's UID).  The problem here, IMO, is that the middleware doesn't 
provide any protection beyond restricting card access to a single 
process.  That doesn't help in a multi-application usage scenario.

What I want is for the middleware to provide a mechanism to ensure a card can 
only be accessed by processes running under a given user account.

        Shawn.

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