security

This is the second part of the guide to smartcard-based authentication on Mac OS X. In this part of the guide, I’m going to assume that following Part 1, you have installed OpenSC, initialised your smartcard, and loaded or generated some certificates and private keys onto it. Now I’m going to show you how to use the card for actual authentication.

Interested in using a smartcard for secure two-factor authentication on OS X? What about E-mail signing and encryption, SSH key authentication, and more? All of these applications are possible, using the built-in smartcard support in OS X and open source software. What follows is the first part of a guide to using smartcards on OS X, using software from the OpenSC Project.