Two new NitroKey-related packages coming to Debian

Nitrokeys Misc
1

This is an announcement rather than a support request. I’m a Debian Developer and I have just packaged and uploaded to packages that should be of interest to some NitroKey users:

OpenCard Framework

This includes ocf-cc as a command line executable, with working bash completion.

nitrotool

This includes full featured bash completion.

If Ubuntu users are interested, I could upload these packages to a Launchpad PPA for easy installation.

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2

Very cool initiative! Did you consider adding “nitrotool” to OpenSC itself? For example, OpenSC contains openpgp-tool already, which is used for other Nitrokeys.

3

I didn’t write nitrotool, I just packaged it. My experience trying to
get changes in OpenSC some years ago makes me not want to revisit trying
to get stuff integrated there. But its fine by me if someone else wants
to do it. I don’t really have an opinion of where that code belongs, I
just want it to be easy to install and use.

4

Great news. I was already wondering about the ITP e-mail in my inbox.

I’ve grabbed the opportunity to release a long standing update to OCF 1.5.209. This release replaces proprietary logging with SLF4J.

Please remember, that there are two jars now, a library in lib/ocf.jar and a command line utility in ocf-cc.jar. The later is the lib bundled with SLF4J, so it can be started directly.

The ocf-cc.jar is used as Web Client for the ScriptingServer, e.g. to access the PKI-as-a-Service Portal.

Btw. an alternative for accessing the portal is to use the latest Smart Card Shell which has a build-in web client that can be activated with Options/Preferences/Start Background web client. If you are a heavy SmartCard-HSM user then there is no need to switch programs.

We also just yesterday released a new version 2.11 of the SmartCard-HSM / Nitrokey HSM middleware. Would be great to have that available in Debian too.

The middleware from the sc-hsm-embedded project is an alternative to OpenSC and provides better access to specific functions of a SmartCard-HSM.

5

Great to hear you support the inclusion in Debian! I CC’ed you on the ITP bug since the license says Contributors should notify you.

Is the SmartCardShell also free software? Could it be included in Debian?

I can’t make any promises on future packaging work here, I do really want to see NitroKeys work really easily with Debian, and I’m using them myself in production on a daily basis. I would happily to explore contract work as an option for working more on this, I currently do it mostly in my spare time.

6

The Smart Card Shell and other OpenSCDP artifacts are GPLed code. We maintain the code in a git repo in the CDN. Everyone with a SmartCard-HSM can obtain a SSH key to get access.

We also work on setting up our own Gitlab instance to combine the Redmine and git services in a single system.

7

Excellent, thank you!
(I don’t see the packages in my Debian Testing repos, I presume they may come later on?)

8

they are in the NEW queue waiting review and approval:
https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html

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