Operating Systems: General Notes

Serial readers should work fine on all operating systems. USB needs hotplug support, so that you can plugin some new USB device, and if it is a smart card reader, OpenCT needs to be notified. Unfortunatly hotplug on Linux is currently moving from hotplug to udev or hald, so we document all three systems. FreeBSD has devd and no idea about all other systems. Readers in PCMCIA and PC-Card format are experimental and only supported under Linux so far, tested only with the udev setup (but adapting the setup should be easy).

Linux

The current recommended setup is using hal on linux. This way hal will notify openct if a new device is found. You do not need to compile OpenCT with libusb on linux, it should work well without.

For users prefering a setup with mdev, udev or the old hotplug, we still keep those in our documentation.

hald setup

Hald needs a fdi config file and an addon script it runs when something in the fdi config file matches. To install these files. It is recommended to use separate information and policy fdi files. Installation path for the addon is distro specific and there is no simple way to determine it (see  http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15768). It may be /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/libexec, /usr/libexec/hal, /usr/lib/hal, /usr/lib64/hal, /usr/lib32/hal.

openct daemon needs correct permissions for your smart card device. If your openct daemon is running as root, you don't have to care about it. Otherwise you have to edit etc/openct.hald and properly set chown and eventually chmod.

mkdir -p /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/
cp etc/openct.fdi /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/10-usb-openct.fdi
cp openct-policy.fdi /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-usb-openct.fdi 
cp etc/openct.hald /usr/lib/hal/hald-addon-openct # distro dependent
chmod 0755 /usr/lib/hal/hald-addon-openct # needs to be executable

If you are using hal, don't install udev rules.

Direct access to device nodes

If required, there are three possible types of policies for direct access to device nodes: * Only root can access. * Use standard UNIX UID/GID permissions by editing of etc/openct.fdi. * Use UNIX ACL for grating access. Latest hal and openct snapshots support smart-card-reader PolicyKit? policy. With such version of hal, direct access is permitted for local users with active terminal.

OpenCT allows those to access smart card via the daemon, that can access the openct socket directory, usualy /var/run/openct. So you can limit access to that directory to a group or a single user if you want. Several distributions do this by default and limit access to the "scard" group.

==== Incompatibilities =====

Different distributions need different setup. Here are most important differences: * Modern distributions use /dev/bus/usb, older distributions use /proc/bus/usb. You have to check, that your hal provide valid device nodes to the addon. * In older HAL versions USB is "bus", not "subsystem". You have to edit FDI files. * Device permissions are set in a different way in older distributions (e. g. using resmgr).

PCMCIA and PC-Card readers are not yet supported via hald, advice and patches are very welcome.

Hald documentation is available online at  http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/hal-spec/hal-spec.html

Disabling openct addon

If you want to disable openct addon without uninstallation of openct, you can copy etc/openct-disable.fdi to /etc/hal/fdi/policy/.

mdev setup

mdev is provided by busybox to handle hotplug events as udev replacement. It is handy for initramfs configurations.

In order to setup configuration:

udev Setup

Serial support needs nothing special (only the serial driver for your serial device), but USB support on Linux has a few requirements:

OpenCT before 0.6.13 also needs:

Also the udev files need to be installed (see QuickStart for full installation instructions):

# cp etc/openct.udev /etc/udev/rules.d/50-openct.rules
# cp etc/openct_usb /lib/udev/openct_usb
# cp etc/openct_pcmcia /lib/udev/openct_pcmcia
# cp etc/openct_serial /lib/udev/openct_serial

Some common problems with udev:

Hotplug Setup

Serial support needs nothing special (only the serial driver for your serial device), but USB support on Linux has a few requirements:

Also the hotplug files need to be installed (see QuickStart for full installation instructions):

# cp etc/openct.usermap /etc/hotplug/usb/openct.usermap
# cp etc/openct_usb /etc/hotplug/usb/openct

FreeBSD

On FreeBSD

  1. Install from ports
    • security/openct
    • security/opensc
  2. add to /etc/devd.conf or /usr/local/etc/devd/openct.conf (with appropriate device ids):
    # Aladdin eToken PRO USB crypto token
    attach 100 {
            device-name "ugen[0-9]+";
            match "vendor" "0x0529";
            match "product" "0x0514";
            action "/usr/local/sbin/openct-control attach usb:529/514 usb /dev/$device-name";
    };
    detach 100 {
            device-name "ugen[0-9]+";
            match "vendor" "0x0529";
            match "product" "0x0514";
            action "/usr/bin/pkill -fx '/usr/local/sbin/ifdhandler -H [a-z0-9]+ usb /dev/$device-name'";
    };
    
  3. reload devd config
    /etc/rc.d/devd restart
    

List of issues for FreeBSD:

OpenBSD

install from ports
cd /usr/ports/security/openct
make install clean
cd /usr/ports/security/opensc
make install clean

Erase and key generation works so far, but OpenSSL does not: the OpenSSL shell exits after the engine load command for some unknown reason. Note you need to specify the engine shared object file as *.so.0.0 (on Linux it is simply *.so).

Also OpenBSD has a hotplugd, but so far it does not support USB devices. So you need to run

openct-control shutdown
openct-control init

every time you add or remove a USB crypto token.

Now OpenBSD Current (2005-07-20) passes all OpenSC regression tests with an Aladdin eToken PRO.

Other tokens however did not work, these problems need to be investigated, as well as how to get it to work without UGEN_DEBUG.

other BSD

OpenCT should work, but this wasn't tested for sometime. Latest OpenCT seems to not find libusb, we are working on it.

Solaris

Latest OpenCT supports Solaris fine and was tested to work.

Sunray

Sunray including client/server architecture was added to OpenCT (in version 0.6.5).