Pinentry and passphrase file button

Robert J. Hansen rjh at sixdemonbag.org
Sun Oct 4 03:25:53 CEST 2015


> I agree that a smartcard is more secure, but not all smartcards are as
> portable or widely used as a thumb drive, for example.

That's meaningless.  Sure, large smartcards exist.  Most of them,
though, are *smaller* than a thumb drive -- look at how large the
knockout panel on a Kernel Concepts card is.

The existence of large smartcards is not an argument to use wildly
unsafe USB storage media for passphrases.

Again, show me the use case.  Show me an instance in which, say, a
Gemalto Shelltoken card reader with a SIM breakout OpenPGP card is an
insufficient alternative to a thumb drive.  A Gemalto card reader is 18
euros; an OpenPGP 2.1 smartcard with SIM breakout is 17 euros.  35 euros
is a pretty reasonable investment.

http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/



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