[closeparen]

When I dug into the smart card scene, it was clearly a world meant for enterprises that make deals on golf courses. The official specs, SDKs, etc. for the hardware is sold for many thousands under "call us" licensing and NDA from NXP. There's some working GPG applets but the open source PKI applets are all abandonware; you're meant to license one (Windows only, of course) from Gemalto, also a "call us" deal.

I've seen some references to anti-side-channel techniques that are trade secret or patented or both. I think you can only get them in a Windows-based "solution" deployed by consultants who are authorized resellers of these companies.

Yubikey has done an incredible thing in democratizing the technology as far as they have for smaller-scale, Linux and Mac-centric users. It's shitty, but don't blame Yubikey.