hey hey,
generally the product page in the shop contains a paragraph headlined with “IMPORTANT NOTICE” it clearly states what’s possible right now and that further functionality will be delivered via software updates.
To create transparency for this process we have introduced the blog, there are regular posts about the progress of the alpha/test firmware and the stable firmware, which also state which functionalities are currently available through the respective firmware variant:
Those are the latest two for the Test and Stable variant. There you’ll find that OpenPGPCard is not (yet) in stable. We expect this to happen within the next weeks as OpenPGPCard looks quite stable right now.
The Nitrokey 3 is equipped with the SE050 Secure Element, although you are right it is currently not used. We decided for a software only implementation of most features first as this serves as the fallback solution, especially for people not trusting in proprietary components like the SE050 (the Nitrokey Start exists also for a reason).
We are also actively developing within the Trussed ecosystem and have extended it to be able to offload specific portions to other so-called “backends”. One of the next targets is to allow the decision for the user whether one would like to use the SE050 as a backend for e.g., OpenPGP Card (all cryptographic primitives and storage) or not. This will then be configurable.
@bmartins please check the linked blog posts, the current stable firmware does not support OpenPGPCard/PKCS#11, but the test firmware indeed does! Although, please keep in mind that this is not yet considered “production-ready”, but this will change very soon as the OpenPGP Card function has nearly reached its stable state.
Hope this clears up some things,
best