lots of instances of scdaemon -- normal?
 

Hi all --

Yesterday I noticed that my Slack64 14.0 stable laptop -- on which I was doing nothing particularly heavy -- was running with the fan at full blast. So I fired up top and found a half dozen or so instances of scdaemon running.

I shut everything down and rebooted. I currently have two of the little boogers popping in and out of my top display. I know that scdaemon is a 'Smart card' daemon connected with gpg-agent and generally not invoked directly ... the procs have my username on them.

Maybe I just need to Google more vigorously, but can anyone tell me whether these are a cause for concern? I've been battling lots of spammers lately and am getting kinda paranoid. :S

/G

I just noticed the same. any news?

Do you normally use an OpenPGP smartcard? GPG-Agent should only start Scdaemon when needed, that is, when the agent needs to delegate a cryptographic operation (signing or decrypting) to a token. Even if you do use a smartcard, there should never be more than one Scdaemon running. And even then, Scdaemon never performs any CPU- or memory-intensive task, so seeing an instance (not to mention several) in a top listing is very unusual.

(Of note, Slackware 14.0 is stuck with a (very) old version of GnuPG, one that has reached end-of-life several years ago. Not that it explains anything, but that alone could be a cause for concerns.)