[higgins-dev] Re: Selector questions

[Paul Trevithick <ptrevithick@xxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Re: Selector questions

Tsvika,

I’m trying to understand your requirements. You wrote to me privately:

• Most of the clients in this [your] project are windows XP based, and the login is done via browsers using un/pw. The computers are shared workstations with common windows account for all the students, making card portability a necessary demand
• In order to avoid the usage of un/pw for card provisioning, it seems that the preferred solution will be to carry the cards on a physical device such as usb key or smart card. For security reasons the cards should not stay on the selector, but vanish when the external device (usb/smartcard) is plugged out.  
  

For Higgins 1.1 we are working on an Adobe AIR selector that uses a hosted I-Card Service. No cards are stored locally, so there is nothing to delete. Cards are stored on the server and fed to any selector that wants/needs them. Could that work?

Now it IS true that for this to work we require a “master” username/password to authenticate the user to the hosted service. Is this what you are trying to avoid in your second bullet above? It seems to me that an external device will cost more than running a hosted I-Card Service and some people think that the external devices themselves should be protected by a PIN etc. to prevent others from using them directly. And in this case both solutions require a password/PIN—so they are equally bad/good in that regard.

--Paul