While I was there, I had another agenda item, creating a HOWTO for enabling a GPG SmartCard for use with SSH. Of course, the SmartCard can be used for both encryption and signing as well.

After finishing that HOWTO, I was talking about it with a few people within Fedora, and there seemed to be quite a bit of interest. It turns out there was quite a bit of interest, so I’ve decided to do a hackfest on Saturday at FUDCon to help move people over to GPG SmartCards. This is also going to be quite nice in that there will be a GPG key signing event after this hackfest.

Come Prepared – Equipment Required

It’s important you come prepared! If you have ever had interest in this sort of thing, there’s time to get equipment for the hackfest. Here’s what you need:

• SmartCard Reader, any will do. I recommend the Gemalto USB Shell Token V2 from kernelconcepts.de.
• An OpenPGP SmartCard. Several vendors have them. I recommend the OpenPGP SmartCard V2 from kernelconcepts.de.

Both pieces are required. Order ASAP, it takes about 10 days to ship. Consider even shipping to the FUDCon hotel if you are concerned or late. I know Petra will work hard to deliver them as fast as possible.

Doing a Little Prep Work

If you get your Token and SmartCard before FUDCon Lawrence and have a few spare minutes, feel free to read through my HOWTO. If you get through it, come to the hackfest and help others who might not have had time.

Cheers,

herlo

• Installed and configured totpcgi authentication on the staging environment. This performs the verification from the clients. There will be several servers doing authentication to prevent a single point of failure.
• Installed and configured pam_url on each staging client with the intent of connecting to the authentication servers.
• Enabled yubikey as an alternate second factor.
• Reviewed RPMs for pam_url and totpcgi (and a few others to help along the way)
• Setup the totpcgi provisioning web page for google authenticator
• Fixed fun bugs in pam_url
• Wrote documentation on how to setup authentication.

A few things were accomplished that were not part of the goals, but good stuff nonetheless:

• Enjoyed some awesome tapas at Buku (a restaurant is at the base of the Red Hat Tower)
• Found the open source cow
• Documented the setup of the OpenPGP SmartCard with gpg-agent and GNOME 3
• Watched Seth Vidal do some Beastie Boys!
• Enjoyed some yummy dinner at Gravy (thanks to Ruth Suehle and Red Hat)
• Discussed some ideas for FUDCon Lawrence and the future of FUDCons

While I didn’t participate in all of the above activities, I was definitely involved in many of them. It turns out, everyone there was fairly involved at the FAD. It was fun to watch everyone come together to solve this issue. Everyone seemed to have a good sense of satisfaction accomplishing the goals.

Cheers,

herlo