Smartcard on LTSP thin clients

[uwe]

hello,

my young students always have problems of logging in correctly so we
loose a lot of time each lesson.

on the other hand I would like to have them something to identify
themselves with the Linux Course at school. So my idea was to give them
a smartcard for authentication to the system.

can anybody tell me if smartcards of the client side is doable in a LTSP
environment - e.g. with keyboard with integrated smartcard reader?

alternatively can one set up a usb stick to do the authentication?

rgds,

uwe