Digitally signing PDF documents in Linux: with hardware token & Okular
We are living in 2022. And it is now possible to digitally sign a PDF document using libre software. This is a love letter to libre software projects, and also a manual.
For a long time, one of the challenges in using libre software in ‘enterprise’ environments or working with Government documents is that one will eventually be forced to use a proprietary software that isn’t even available for a libre platform like GNU/Linux. A notorious use-case is digitally signing PDF documents.
Recently, Poppler (the free software library for rendering PDF; used by Evince and Okular) and Okular in particular has gained a lot of improvements in displaying digital signature and actually signing a PDF document digitally (see this, this, this, this, this and this). When the main developer Albert asked for feedback on what important functionality would the community like to see incorporated as part this effort; I had asked if it would be possible to use hardware tokens for digital signature. Turns out, poppler uses nss (Network Security Services, a Mozilla project) for managing the certificates, and if the token is enrolled in NSS database, Okular should be able to just use it.
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