Enrico Zini: CAdES signatures on Debian
CAdES is a digital signature
standard that is used and sometimes mandated, by the Italian Public
Administration.
To be able to do my job, I own a Carta Nazionale dei Servizi
(CNS) with which I
can generate legally binding signatures. Now comes the problem of finding a
software to do it.
Infocamere Firma4NG
InfoCamere are distributing a
software called Firma4NG,
with a Linux option, which, I'm pleased to say, seems to work just fine.
Autofirma
AutoFirma is a Java
software for digital signatures distributed by the Spanish government, which
has a Linux version.
It is licensed as
Test if you can access the smart card with:
You can find other
Edit
Test with
See PKCS11 URI documentation here.
Install the PKCS11 engine for openssl
It looks like providers replaced
engines, and
this would not be needed, but I couldn't find a way to convince openssl to work
without this.
Sign a document
It verifies correctly using the Austrian verification system.
All the Italian verification
systems
I tried, however, complain that, although the signature is valid, the
certificate is emitted by an unqualified CA and the certificate revocation
information cannot be found.
PAdES
When signing PDF files, the PAdES
standard is sometimes accepted.
LibreOffice is able to generate PAdES signatures using the "File / Digital
signatures " menu, and provided the smart card is in the reader it is able to
use it. Both LibreOffice and Okular can verify that the signature is indeed
there.
However, when trying to validate the signature using Italian validators, I get
the same complaints about unqualified CAs and missing revocation information.
Wall of shame
Dike GoSign
Infocert (now Tinexta) used to
distribute a software called "Dike GoSign" that worked on Ubuntu, which I used
on a completely isolated VM, and it was awful but it worked.
I had to regenerate the VM for it, and discovered that the version they
distribute now will refuse to work unless one signs in online with a Tinexta
account. From the same company that asks you to install their own root
certifiactes
to use their digital signature system.
Gross.
Dropped.
Aruba Sign
Aruba used to distribute a
software called Aruba Sign, which also worked on Ubuntu.
Ubuntu support has been discontinued, and they now only offer support for
Windows or Mac.
Yuck. Dropped.
GPL-2+ EUPL-1.1, and the source seems to be
here.
While my Spanish is decent I lack jargon for this specific field, and I didn't
manage to make it work with my CNS.
Autogram
Andrej Shadura pointed me to Autogram,
a Slovakian software for digital signatures, licensed under the EUPL-1.2.
The interface is still only in Slovakian, so tried it but I didn't go very far
in trying to make it work.
OpenSSL
In trixie, openssl is almost, but not quite, able to do it. Here's as far as I've got.
Install opensc
apt install opensc
pkcs11-tool --list-objects [-l]
pkcs11-tool examples here
Set up a pkcs11 provider for openssl
apt install pkcs11-provider
/etc/ssl/openssl.cnf:
- In
[provider_sect]addpkcs11 = pkcs11_sect - In
[default_sect], uncommentactivate = 1 - Add this new section:
[pkcs11_sect]
module = /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ossl-modules/pkcs11.so
pkcs11-module-path = /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkcs11/opensc-pkcs11.so
default_algorithms = ALL
activate = 1
openssl list -providers
You can check if openssl can see keys on the card:
openssl pkey -in 'pkcs11:id=%01' -pubin -pubout -text
apt install libengine-pkcs11-openssl
openssl cms -nodetach -binary -cades -outform DER -in filename -out filename.p7m -sign -signer 'pkcs11:id=%01' -keyform engine -engine pkcs11
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by 
LWN wrote 
It's Sunday and I'm now sitting in the train from Brest to Paris where I will be changing to Germany, on the way back from the 
Pollito and the gang of DebConf mascots wearing their conference badges (photo: Christoph Berg)
F/DF7CB in Brest (photo: Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras)
The northern coast of Ushant (photo: Christoph Berg)
Having a nice day (photo: Christoph Berg)
Pollito on stage (photo: Christoph Berg)
So, for the first year, this year s DebConf had the DebConf Academic Track ,
that is, content for a one-day-long set of short sessions, for which of them
there was a written article presenting the content often with a very academic
format, but not necessarily. I hope that for future DebConfs we will continue to
hold this track, and that we can help bridge the gap: to get people that are
not usually from the academic / universitary prepare content that will be
formally expressed and included in a long-lasting, indexed book of
proceedings. We did have (informal) proceedings in many of the early DebConfs,
and I m very happy to regain that, but with 20 years of better practices.
Anyway, of course, I took the opportunity to join this experiment, and together
with my Mexican colleague Tzolkin Gardu o who is finishing her PhD here in
France (or should I say, second to her, as she is the true leading author of our
work). And here you can see the paper we submitted to the DebConf Academic
Track, which will be published soon:
The Internet has changed a lot in the last 40+ years. Fads have come and gone.
Network protocols have been designed, deployed, adopted, and abandoned.
Industries have come and gone. The types of people on the internet have changed
a lot. The number of people on the internet has changed a lot, creating an
information medium unlike anything ever seen before in human history. There s a
lot of good things about the Internet as of 2025, but there s also an
inescapable hole in what it used to be, for me.
I miss being able to throw a site up to send around to friends to play with
without worrying about hordes of AI-feeding HTML combine harvesters DoS-ing my
website, costing me thousands in network transfer for the privilege. I miss
being able to put a lightly authenticated game server up and not worry too much
at night wondering if that process is now mining bitcoin. I miss being able
to run a server in my home closet. Decades of cat and mouse games have rendered
running a mail server nearly impossible. Those who are brave enough to try
are met with weekslong stretches of delivery failures and countless hours
yelling ineffectually into a pipe that leads from the cheerful lobby of some
disinterested corporation directly into a void somewhere 4 layers below ground
level.
I miss the spirit of curiosity, exploration, and trying new things. I miss
building things for fun without having to worry about being too successful,
after which security offices start demanding my supplier paperwork in
triplicate as heartfelt thanks from their engineering teams. I miss communities
that are run because it is important to them, not for ad revenue. I miss
community operated spaces and having more than four websites that are all full
of nothing except screenshots of each other.
Every other page I find myself on now has an AI generated click-bait title,
shared for rage-clicks all brought-to-you-by-our-sponsors completely covered
wall-to-wall with popup modals, telling me how much they respect my privacy,
with the real content hidden at the bottom bracketed by deceptive ads served by
companies that definitely know which new coffee shop I went to last month.
This is wrong, and those who have seen what was know it.
I can t keep doing it. I m not doing it any more. I reject the notion that
this is as it needs to be. It is wrong. The hole left in what the Internet used
to be must be filled. I will fill it.
In this post, I demonstrate the optimal workflow for creating new Debian packages in 2025, preserving the upstream git history. The motivation for this is to lower the barrier for sharing improvements to and from upstream, and to improve software provenance and supply-chain security by making it easy to inspect every change at any level using standard git tooling.
Key elements of this workflow include:
In this post, I demonstrate the optimal workflow for creating new Debian packages in 2025, preserving the upstream git history. The motivation for this is to lower the barrier for sharing improvements to and from upstream, and to improve software provenance and supply-chain security by making it easy to inspect every change at any level using standard git tooling.
Key elements of this workflow include:
A popular topic of public conversation in 2025 is balance. How do we balance budgets, how do we balance entities, and how do we balance perspectives? How do we balance the right of free expression with our ability to effectively convey a message?Here s another popular topic of conversation AI. What is it? What does it do?I m going to give you some resources, as someone who first learned the inner workings of AI about ten years ago.I ll start with the presentation I gave in middle school. Our objective was to give a presentation on a topic of our choice, and we would be graded on our ability to give a presentation. Instead of talking about specific things or events, I talked about the broader idea of fully establishing an artificial form of intelligence.This is the video I used as a basis for that presentation:
