For a long time now I’ve realised one of the biggest problems with PKI, especially in organisations, is distribution and management of the keys/certificates. So now that I actually have some hardware to play with it’s enabled me to start working on some solutions to this problem.

My first solution to this problem was also my first attempt at coding a PHP-GTK application as well, one of the benefits of PHP-GTK is it’s ability to be run across many platforms similar to java and .net, the down side was a major lack of decent examples and documentation. I came across numerous applications in the “Hello World”, and some very very advanced applications such as the novap2p app, but there was very little in the way of what I was attempting, so hopefully it will serve as a good demo for others as well as a useful tool for people with hardware crypto devices. The other down side is poor GUI design tools, I ended up using glade, but it is by far the worst GUI design tool I’ve ever used, although I don’t know that the full blame lies with glade, but it could have been made so much better, all the elements are there just some of the defaults are brain dead.

In any case, and a number of other non-php/gtk related issue later, I’ve posted the app online as well as some screen shots to the wiki, it’s a very basic app to make things easier in getting certificates signed and onto PKI cards, but it does work pretty well even if I do say so myself.