As others already hinted at in the lwn comments, a keycard without an external keypad or confirmation system gives you a lot less protection than you probably e

As others already hinted at in the lwn comments, a keycard without an external keypad or confirmation system gives you a lot less protection than you probably expect: usually your computer will be no more protected from keyloggers able to record that pin and from the execution of requests to the keycard then from the theft of locally stored private keys. Actually in what's probably still most cases a keylogger will be trivial to set up (https://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2011/04/linux-security-circus-on-gui-isolation.html https://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2011/04/linux-securi...). A keycard will avoid (with very high probability) the theft of the private keys, but in most cases this is not that important, if an attacker can do individual sign/decrypt/encrypt operations on demand it will be more than enough for him. Unfortunately for some reason it looks like almost all the recent affordable key-handling devices lack an external keypad. There's either some misconception about their security or some wilful scheme to give a false sense of security to the people who use them (I wrote it tongue-in-cheek but actually we've seen worse...). Also, it's not true that "a key generated on a keycard cannot be backed up", most devices permit the export and re-import of keys by first encrypting them with a key known only by the device (and not exportable); these will effectively be back-ups, although they're only useful against the accidental deletion of the keys, not against the loss/damage of the device. By the way, this feature is also notable for being the source of vulnerabilities in many devices that made it possible to extract the raw keys. P.S. I don't know why the author uses that unusual "keycard" term, I assumed he means smartcards or dongles