Study And Implement Of Smart Card Based Authentication System

It is important for a computer system saving vital data or offering critical service to have a perfect authentication mechanism. Using the authentication mechanism, the unauthentic access is not allowed. Only basing on a secure and reliable authentication, a secure system can protect the data and service perfectly. To those systems using password or some kind of cryptographical method to accomplish authentication, a big problem is where to save those sensitive data such as password or keys used to encrypt or decrypt. Making these sensitive data away from being. hacked by hackers is a key point of a safe system. If the authentication process is integrated with Smart Card technique, saving those sensitive data in Smart-Card can offering the system more secure and effective authentication.This research work emphasizes on realizing a smart-card based authentication on Linux system. It mainly includes following contents:1. Writing a Pam service module achieves the goal of Smart-Card authentication. Through configuring the PAM module, the Linux local authentication succeeds only for those having a valid Smart Card and the PIN.2. Embedded the Smart-Card authentication into the SSH client side and server side, the SSH can work together with Smart Card to accomplish remote logon authentication.3. Writing a Smart-Card accessing module and loading it into the browser provide the user a Smart Card based Web authentication. When the Web server asking the client side to authenticate himself, the browser will call the module and ask the card to accomplish the authentication.This paper makes a detailed analysis of those functions described here. The system uses a LDAP server to manage all the computers in the realm. And it uses a PC/SC middleware to serve the Smart-Card operation. The paper also describes the system's configuration and administrant tools that used to make the administrator easy working with the card.The paper also analyzes the security of the system and points out some limitations and shortcomings exist.