Smart Card Readers for Mac OS X
Getting non-standard hardware to work is not that easy. The first thing you’ll do is searching the internet for devices reported to work flawlessly with Mac OS X. This came up on me when looking for compatible Smart Card Readers. This is just an example for this “finding the needle in the haystack”. Normally, also Apple provides no hints on working devices. But for Smart Card Readers I accidentally found a note in an Apple document which lists compatible readers for Mac OS X. I hope this blogpost lists up #1 on Google soon.
Compatible Smart Card Readers:
Mac OS X Tiger includes built-in support for many types of smart card readers.
Compatible smart card readers include:
* Any certified Chip Card Interface Device (CCID) USB class reader
* USB readers such as Athena, CryptoCard, GemPlus, and SCM
* PC Card readers such as CryptoCard, SCM, and OmniKey
* USB dongle readers such as OmniKey and GemPlus
Source: Apple Smart Card Setup Guide
Tags: smartcard, apple, usb reader, reader, compatible
Tunnelblick for Leopard
Posted by: cordney* in development on May 14th, 2008
While setting up a simple VPN with OpenVPN I had to get a Leopard compatible version of Tunnelblick, a GUI openVPN client. Unfortunately the maintainer had some trouble getting it to work with Leopard and the latest version is still very buggy.
Luckily someone from the Mozilla dev team fixed it and it works fine now in 10.5.
Thanks, John Justin!
[paper] On the security of Linux user passwords
This is a paper I wrote for one of my courses at university.
From the abstract:
In this paper we determine the security of user passwords on Linux
based operating systems. We have a look at the two basic security mech-
anisms passwords are created and stored using a reference Linux distri-
bution, locate common attack vectors and propose available countermea-
sures.
Extending the 4 primitives of cryptography
Dealing with all these new technologies like e-passport, the e-healt card, voting machines etc, I strongly encourage extending the 4 primitives of cryptography (and data security, from my point of view):
traditional primitives of cryptography:
- confidentiality
- authenticity
- integrity
- non-repudiation
proposal of an extension to the 4 primitives:
- privacy
- non-traceability
- non-linkability