Do you (or anyone else on the list) have experience using a smartcard with WO or any other web development? Here are things I'd like to do:
Easy-
Ask for an identity certificate (not too hard, they are X.509 based)
Sign an iText document (also not hard, the iText in Action book describes the process)
Hard-
Get other properties off the card.
Purpose-
When a new user creates a profile, I don't want them to have to play 20 questions. It's error prone and annoying. Everyone in my organization (US Air Force) has to use the card to gain access to a computer or government web site anyway and hates entering thier data yet again to use a small app. Thier full name, title or military rank, unique ID number, date of birth, organization, etc. are all on the card and reasonably guaranteed to be error free. I want to pull that data. Also, my app has more person entities than active users; for example if I am my unit representative then I currently need to find and hand type the personal information for the 20 people in my unit knowing I will never get 20 people to create accounts in a painful process. But I could ask them to stop by and put thier card in my computer for 5 seconds. As far as I can tell, there is
no way for a web server to get that information directly like it can when it asks for a certificate because this data is not stored in a certificate. But could a _javascript_ application get it?
I've found a lot of documentation on the web for using X.509 certificates, and other sources for writing native client code to interface directly with smartcards, but nothing on using the card's stored data from inside a web browser.
Tavis McDevitt