two factor authentication

[William Ahern]

On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 04:42:20PM -0500, Douglas E. Engert wrote:
> But most don't have any self contained I/O or logging capability. They 
> depend
> on the machine into which they are inserted. Once the pin has been given, to
> unlock the card, the card does not know what it is signing, and the user can
> not even tell if the card is being used, thus it could still be misused by 
> some
> back door to make a few more ssh conections, or sign a few more documents
> without the user's knowledge.
> 
> So if you want to call it the computer in your pocket, it should have
> some output indicator to at least tell the user it is being used.  A reader
> with these capabilitoes cound alos help.
> 
> I am not saying there is anything better, but a smart card could be
> smarter.

True. We were just discussing that at work. Requiring a finger print scan
for every signing operation would be nice.

Or something more specific: a bank issued smart card used w/ Mozilla's
PKCS#11 support would know the bank's public key. Whenever the card
established a TLS connection to the bank a green light might be illuminated.

The smart card can definitely be improved upon, but the real point is that
it's a fundamental change in authentication technology... sort of like when
OpenSSH killed telnet ;) It allows one to construct a system w/ hard
guarantees (well, an incomparably greater degree of assurance), something
not feasible today.