Scdtools is a set of utility tools to work with Scdaemon, the smartcard daemon of the GnuPG project, and OpenPGP smartcards.
Scdrand obtains up to 256 bytes of random data from a ISO7816-compliant smartcard and adds them to the kernel entropy pool.
It uses Scdaemon to send a GET CHALLENGE
to the smartcard. As per
ISO 7816-4, the smartcard replies with random bytes, which scdrand then
sends to the Linux kernel entropy pool through the RNDADDENTROPY ioctl
call on /dev/random
.
Since that call requires root privileges, scdrand is installed with
the setuid bit set. To mitigate risks associated with running as root,
the program forks itself at startup and only the child retains the root
privileges needed to write to /dev/random
. The parent process, in
charge of communicating with the smartcard, then runs with the
privileges on the calling user.
The most basic usage of scdrand is as follows:
$ scdrand 32
The program will request 32 random bytes from the card, feed them to the entropy pool, then quits. You can request from 1 to 256 bytes.
With the -l, --loop
option, scdrand will not quit, but will
periodically request random bytes from the card and feed them to the
pool. With the -t, --threshold
option, scdrand will attempt to feed
the pool only if the available entropy in the pool falls below a
specified threshold. So in the following example:
$ scdrand -l -i 1 -t 512 256
scdrand will check the state of the entropy pool every second; if
there is less than 512 bits of entropy available, it will feed the pool
with 256 random bytes. The program will quit upon receiving a ^C
signal.
Scdtotp uses an OpenPGP smartcard as a poor man’s one-time password generator token. It generates time-based one-time password (TOTP) as per RFC 6238, based on a key it expects to find in the private data object of the inserted OpenPGP smartcard.
Contrary to a true password generator token, the key cannot remain only on the smartcard, it has to be sent to the computer so that scdtotp can derive the password from it. Thus it cannot provide the same level of security.
The key must be stored as an otpauth://
URI as specified in Google
Authenticator’s wiki,
e.g.:
otpauth://totp/alice@example.org?secret=KIMEFUAW4SRW
where the secret parameter is the Base32-encoded key. This format allows to specify also the non-secret parameters of the TOTP algorithm:
&algorithm=mac
, where mac can be sha1
(default), sha256
, or sha512
;&period=N
, where N is expressed in seconds (30
seconds by default);&digits=N
(defaults to 6).The (undocumented) privatedo N
command of the GnuPG’s card editor
may be used to store the URI into the Nth private DO of the OpenPGP
smartcard.
Once the URI is on the card and the card is inserted in the card reader, simply calling scdtotp will print the one-time password for the current time window on standard output.
Scdtools requires the following GnuPG libraries at compile-time:
GnuPG itself, with its helper daemons gpg-agent and scdaemon, is required at run-time.
See the provided INSTALL file for detailed instructions about how to use the Autotools-generated build system.
To generate the build system itself (note, this is only needed to build
from a repository checkout rather than from a release tarball), install
the Autotools (autoconf,
automake, and
libtool), and run the command
autoreconf -i
in the top-level directory. Then refer to the
aforementioned INSTALL file.
Scdtools is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3 or higher. The full license is included in the COPYING file of the source distribution.
The project is located at https://incenp.org/dvlpt/scdtools.html. The latest source code is available in a Git repository at https://git.incenp.org/damien/scdtools.
Download the latest release tarball:
scdtools-0.3.5.tar.gz (application/gzip, 152K, signature)