I recently picked up an older but perfectly adequate HP Z Book Firefly with a built-in smart card reader and I’m wondering what possible use is this little bit of tech? Can I, like, auth with my credit card or whatever? (mostly joking, I briefly looked at the PAM config for that and prefer my current hobbies lol)
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There are OpenPGP smart cards, which I used a long time ago since now there are USB dongles available that eliminate the need for a smart card reader and of course a lot of proprietary smart cards used in many companies for the same use cases: authentication, encryption, signatures, etc…
You can store a private/public key pair on a smart card and use it for digitally signing or encrypting things like email, or just for authenticating to your PC. Some banks also support authentication by client certificate; web browsers can access your smart card for authenticating to web sites.
Your laptop is a cash counter.
New-ish EU national IDs have NFC capability and certificate in them so you can probably sign something with that if you figure out how
