smartcard insert / removal event notification

azm882 · 06-24-2010, 01:41 PM

Folks,

I'm working on an app that will authenticate user with a smartcard when the user inserts it in the card reader (this is on Red Hat 5.5). How do I detect a card has been inserted? Is there a daemon service I need to listen to and associated api to get notified etc? thanks in advance.

smoker · 06-24-2010, 01:49 PM

I would guess udev rules would be the way to go.
http://reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html

azm882 · 06-24-2010, 02:05 PM

smoker, thanks! I'll take a look at it.

However I forgot to mention that we'd need to get notified at red hat login screen level. would udev allow that at login level where user simply inserts to the card for authentication instead of entering user name password?

there is PAM level config you can do to authenticate a user without having to write your own app however we need to do some extra stuff due to which we need event notification (or detection of card insertion).

smoker · 06-24-2010, 02:52 PM

I honestly don't know about the login level. udev runs at boot, and can hold up device detection if one of your rules takes a long time. However, the login is well after device detection anyway, so I would have thought it would be a matter of interfacing your custom udev action rule with the PAM config somehow, short circuiting the login process. How you do that, again, I don't know - it's not something I've attempted.