Smart Card Authentication in Mixed Environments?

Posted by Cliff on Friday December 28, 2001 @09:22PM from the life-does-not-consist-of-only-one-monolithic-OS dept.

Rednerd asks: "I've been looking into Smart Cards as a good alternative to password authentication but other than the ISO 7816 standard there doesn't seem to be a lot of standards that govern the use of these devices. It seems pretty clear that if I was working in an all Sun, or Microsoft environment implementing a network wide Smart Card solution would be simple, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of heterogeneous Smart Card support out there. I was wondering what kind of experience slashdot readers have had with Smart Cards in mixed environments? What cards and card readers seem to work the best? How have remote users dealt with the use of Smart Cards?"

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Re:Careful... by larien · 2001-12-29 03:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

Yup, there are USB and keyboard devices. Where I work, we use smart cards in Win2K and Compaq keyboards with inbuilt card readers. Even the laptops have a card reader builtin. For older hardware being reused, there are external USB or serial readers available, but you really want to use the USB versions as they are apparently much faster than the serial or keyboard devices.
Oh, and we have to have a PIN (it says PIN, but it's really a password) to log in as well, to prevent card theft being an easy back door into the system.