On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, Dr S N Henson wrote:

> Carlos Prados wrote:
> >
> >
> > Again, I would pay more athention to local security.
> > Why is the file /tmp/.pcscrx world writtable? isn't
> > this a security hole?
> >
>
> On the subject of security...
>
> As may be apparent I've only just got my setup working and I've not
> examined things in any detail. I did notice a few things which might be
> cause for concern.
>
> Consider a Netscape PKCS#11 module. In this application the connection
> to the reader may need to be kept open for an extended period of time
> (typically the whole browser session) and may not be closed cleanly. As
> we are all painfully aware its not entirely unknown for a browser to
> crash.

For the PKCS#11 part, there's a solution: just use random session numbers,
and close all the sessions if you detect at least 3 invalid session
numbers...

That way, the application can crash, but trying to attach to this previous
session and keep the authenticated state would be difficult.

-- 
Erwann ABALEA
eabaleacertplus.com
RSA PGP Key ID: 0x2D0EABD5
-----
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Threads are for people who can't program state machines.
                                     Alan Cox
               in a discussion about the threads and the Linux scheduler
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