DoD CAC reader issues (VMware Horizon and Arch wiki)

Cheeto · 2022-09-11 22:03:04

Not a question, but something I had an issue with as a newb and it's taken me a week to figure everything out, so hopefully other newbs can make use of it in the future. There's another website (militarycac) that comes up way higher in search results and has guides for Linux related to CAC stuff, I never would have found the arch wiki stuff if I wasn't familiar with arch to begin with, so maybe this existing in a forum post will help the solution bubble to the top and also gain some views for the arch wiki guide for cac stuff which actually works perfectly (well, almost, see below).

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I followed the steps at the arch wiki at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Common_Access_Card. It works, but there are two notes:

1. 3.1.2 says to obtain an archive of certs, and to install 6 of them, but the archive only contains 5 of them. It's missing what the archive lists as #2, "Certificates_PKCS7_v5.9_DoD_DoD_Root_CA_2.der.p7b"

2. When using VMware Horizon, you can't access afrcdesktops.us.af.mil with the default settings. It gripes about DOD SW CA-60 and DoD Root CA 3 being invalid. Whether they are or not is unimportant; you can't continue unless you go to file > preferences > enable "Do not verify server identity certificates."

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Unrelated: can someone offer some clarification on certs and CAs? I took Sec+ so I'm not totally unfamiliar with them, but for example with these military ones, they all have CA in their name. Is that just a weird DoD convention, or are the terms CA and certificate used interchangeably sometimes?

Last edited by Cheeto (2022-09-11 22:05:40)

Slithery · 2022-09-11 22:06:31

The forum is the wrong place for this.

If the wiki is missing information then feel free to add it yourself.

Arch Linux

#1 2022-09-11 22:03:04

DoD CAC reader issues (VMware Horizon and Arch wiki)

#2 2022-09-11 22:06:31

Re: DoD CAC reader issues (VMware Horizon and Arch wiki)

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