Simple beginners questions about the gpg-smartcard

[Alexander W. Janssen]

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Hi all,

I just subsribed to the list. I'm using the gpg-smartcard and it just
works for me.

However, I have a couple of maybe really simple questions which
weren't answered by the documentation I've read so far - yet.

1) Once I created my keypair on the smartcard and I was able to use it
on that system.
Now I bought several other smartcard-readers for my other machines and
I learned that I need to import the secret key (which I backuped
during the creation of the key on the card on the first system) on
every other machine which wants to use the smartcard too.
Why is that like that?
I thought that the secret key remains on the smartcard, and that this
is actually the benefit of the smartcard.
Why do I need to import the secret-key from disk to some local gpg to
that it can recognize the key on the smartcard at all?
I'm probably doing something wrong. Any pointers?

2) I bought a couple of SCM SPR-532 cardreaders. I learned that the
pin-pads are currently only experimentally supported by gpg
2.something. Is there any chance that the pin-pad support will be
backported to gpg 1.4.x?

Thanks a lot for your pointers & help. I probably just suck in reading
documentation.

Cheers, Alex.

- --
"I am tired of all this sort of thing called science here... We have spent
millions in that sort of thing for the last few years, and it is time it
should be stopped."
 -- Simon Cameron, U.S. Senator, on the Smithsonian Institution, 1901.


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