Red Hat Training

A Red Hat training course is available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

11.4. Setting up a Kerberos Client for Smart Cards

Smart cards can be used with Kerberos, but it requires additional configuration to recognize the X.509 (SSL) user certificates on the smart cards:
  1. Install the required PKI/OpenSSL package, along with the other client packages:
    [root@server ~]# yum install krb5-pkinit
    [root@server ~]# yum install krb5-workstation krb5-libs
  2. Edit the /etc/krb5.conf configuration file to add a parameter for the public key infrastructure (PKI) to the [realms] section of the configuration. The pkinit_anchors parameter sets the location of the CA certificate bundle file.
    [realms]
      EXAMPLE.COM = {
        kdc = kdc.example.com.:88
        admin_server = kdc.example.com
        default_domain = example.com
        ...
        pkinit_anchors = FILE:/usr/local/example.com.crt
     }
  3. Add the PKI module information to the PAM configuration for both smart card authentication (/etc/pam.d/smartcard-auth) and system authentication (/etc/pam.d/system-auth). The line to be added to both files is as follows:
    auth    optional    pam_krb5.so use_first_pass no_subsequent_prompt preauth_options=X509_user_identity=PKCS11:/usr/lib64/pkcs11/opensc-pkcs11.so
    If the OpenSC module does not work as expected, use the module from the coolkey package: /usr/lib64/pkcs11/libcoolkeypk11.so. In this case, consider contacting Red Hat Technical Support or filing a Bugzilla report about the problem.