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List:       kmail-devel
Subject:    Re: S/MIME
From:       Bernhard Reiter <bernhard () intevation ! de>
Date:       2003-09-10 13:20:08
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On Friday 05 September 2003 01:12, George Staikos wrote:
> On Thursday 04 September 2003 07:18, Karl-Heinz Zimmer cited Werner Koch:
> > > There is one large disadvantage in relying on gpg to embed S/MIME in
> > > KMail: gpg does not support smartcards in a standard, generic manner.
> > > It does not support PKCS#11.
> >
> > We could start a long debate on the usefulness of pkcs#11 but I don't
> > have time for that.  So let me just say this: There is no need for
> > Free Software to adapt a standard, solely existing to allow
> > interoperation of proprietary software.  An exception is Mozilla and
> > OpenSC; pkcs#11 makes sense here because nobody wants to dive into
> > modilla code to add another and cleaner interface than pkcs#11.
>
>    Yeah well I don't want to support flash, realaudio, or even Netscape
> style plugin interfaces in konqueror either.  It also sucks to have to
> support websites that make completely illegal and broken HTML.  We don't
> exactly get a choice.  This is about making things work, not programming a
> utopia.

I think that Werner is interested in making stuff work.
He said that he's open to debate in what way pkcs#11 is helpful
for this or not on the gpa-dev@gnupg.org list in more detail
if people are interested.

> > > This is sad because it automatically excludes every smartcard for
> > > which the manufacturer or issuer have gone through the trouble of
> > > providing a Linux version of their PKCS#11 driver. In Belgium the
> > > (mandatory!) national
> >
> > Please tell me about a pkcs#11 driver which is under a GPL compatible
> > license.  For legal reasons you can't use a proprietary driver due to
> > the resulting GPL violation.
> >
> > If you want support for your card, try to get the specs (good luck)
> > and either add support to OpenSC or contact me for native gnupg
> > support.  If the card is a pkcs#15 one it should work instantly,
> > anyway.
>
>    I was talking to Olaf Kirch at OLS and he said he was working on PKCS#11
> (IIRC).  Once I get time to actually seriously look at it, I will be
> contacting him about it.

I guess this is just an missunderstanding in this point then.
If somebody wants to add a PKCS#11 interface, that might be a step foward.
the question remains if that will be a major step forward, but
that certainly is a different question.

Not having PKCS#11 will certainly not exclude smartcards IIRC, though.

["smime.p7s" (application/pkcs7-signature)]

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