Fwd: Re: KDE and smartcard support

[Justin Karneges]

At Thiago's request, I'm moving this thread to kde-core-devel, where the 
discussion shall continue.

Summary: Alon Bar-Lev, a prominent implementer of smart card capabilities in 
open source software, has approached KDE to find out what must be done to 
enable smart card usage throughout the KDE desktop.  Konqueror is the primary 
target, but shared support for all KDE applications would be ideal (including 
kdm, for logins).  I am behind him, as this is one of the areas I was 
planning to solve with QCA.

Part of the issue in implementing smart cards in KDE (or just Konqueror) is 
determining which of the layers should be responsible for this sort of thing.  
There's KIO, KSSL, and QSslSocket.  There's also the issue of whether to use 
QSslSocket or QCA::TLS.  George and Thiago insist on using QSslSocket in KDE, 
although it is not clear if QSslSocket usage will replace KSSL usage yet (as 
KSSL currently has more features).  They seem to be open to code 
contribution, and so the latest message in the thread (mine, below) discusses 
where the modifications would need to take place if smart card support were 
contributed.  George states that it is really the KIO API that applications 
will target.

I hope Thiago or George can give a real reply to the message below now. :)

-Justin

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: KDE and smartcard support
Date: Monday 21 May 2007 9:47 pm
From: Thiago Macieira <thiago at kde.org>
To: Justin Karneges <justin at affinix.com>
Cc: George Staikos <staikos at kde.org>, "Alon Bar-Lev" 
<alon.barlev at gmail.com>, "Stephan Kulow" <coolo at kde.org>, "Brad Hards" 
<bradh at frogmouth.net>, "Andreas Aardal Hanssen" <ahanssen at trolltech.com>

Justin Karneges wrote:
>Okay, so perhaps the first step for smart card capability in Konqueror
> is to evaluate the KIO API, and see if it has all of the necessary
> hooks, since this is the API that Konqueror targets.  It may also be
> the case that no required hooks are needed, if the functionality can be
> implemented as UI prompts controlled by KIO, right?
>
>Next would be to decide where in the stack (KIO and under) that this
> handling should be implemented, and write some code to be submitted to
> KDE.
>
>Do you think this is a reasonable approach?
>
>By the way, are all protocols planned to go through KIO?  For example,
> Kopete currently uses QCA for some of its IM protocols.  Will these IM
> protocols eventually be wrapped in KIO?  If not, what is the TLS API
> recommendation for these applications?  Or can they just use whatever
> they want?

Please continue the discussion in kde-core-devel. There's no need to keep
it private.

--
  Thiago Macieira  -  thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
    PGP/GPG: 0x6EF45358; fingerprint:
    E067 918B B660 DBD1 105C  966C 33F5 F005 6EF4 5358

-------------------------------------------------------