pkinit prompting behavior issue

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

--On Tuesday, February 23, 2010 10:21:50 AM -0600 Nicolas Williams 
<Nicolas.Williams at sun.com> wrote:

> As for PKCS#11 softtokens on USB drives...  I believe that a softtoken
> implementation should present N virtual slots, all empty, and when
> removable media becomes available (mounted) it should search the
> top-level for softtoken files, then pick the first available virtual
> slot and pretend that there is now a token in that slot (and
> C_Wait4Slot() should allow you to wait on a virtual slot).  Of course,
> having virtual softtoken slots means that one could not skip an "insert
> token" prompt on the basis of there being no slots.

We're not talking only about USB softtokens.  We're also talking about real 
tokens, which present as a USB-connected smartcard "reader" containing a 
"card" which is an integral part of the device.  Until you insert the USB 
token, the reader is not present in the system.  Of course, there are 
non-smartcard devices that behave the same way.