There is no technical reason that prevents smartcards being supported in
nhsbuntu. If the US Department of Defence Common Access Card is fully
working, an NHS Smartcard can’t be too great a challenge.
In our development work we’ve successfully read the certificates on the NHS
smartcards using the pcsd tools. The omnipresent OmniCard reader is
supported as are readers that support the nfc chip.
PKS11 and a whole lot of other libs and tools make interaction with
smartcards of many varieties and functions play nicely on Linux.
Right now the ‘missing piece’ is the Identity Agent, the code that pings
the Spine endpoint when the PIN is entered and is used to wrap up token
requests with the certificates. With that piece of code we would be able to
use the smartcard with any browser and access web services that require
Spine authentication.
Separately, there are Windows clinical apps that use Spine CIS for
authentication. For these we use a Windows VM to publish seamless apps to
the NHSbuntu desktop.
Rob