On 10/14/2010 04:31 PM, Grant Olson wrote: > But ultimately once you start trying to fix the problem by offloading > the checks to special hardware, you might as well just key a smart card > reader with an integrated keypad. Then you can use a simple pin. Not > quite as convenient as hitting Y/N, but way more convenient than a > really strong password.
Yes, that'd be nice, if that hardware is available and convenient for the user. But far more people have access to a laptop with system-handled ACPI key combinations than have access to card readers with integrated keypads. card readers with integrated keypads are also bulky, awkward to transport and use in mobile context, and tend to be significantly slower at performing secret-key operations than modern computers (laptop or desktop). card readers with integrated keypads are also additional points of failure, and have a non-negligible financial cost over and above the cost of the hardware on which to run GnuPG. Back to the original point: a confirmation prompt for the agent has the potential to be useful in many cases, particularly with the agent model described for the upcoming gnupg 2.1, and to a lesser extent with earlier versions of the agent protocol. I'm not denying that there are other approaches which might solve the same problem, but there are tradeoffs to all of them which may not be suitable for any particular user. I remain perplexed at the opposition this reasonable feature proposal has received. Regards, --dkg
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