Features/Fingerprint

Fingerprint Readers

Summary

The goal of the project is making fingerprint readers as easy as possible to use for secondary authentication.

See the use cases in the whiteboard.

Owner

• Name: Bastien Nocera

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 11
• Last updated: 2008-11-27
• Percentage of completion: 80% (some code available)

libusb1, and the required libfprint are available in rawhide (F-11). The authconfig patch to enable pam_fprintd

fprintd is being reviewed. It includes a pam plugin to not require a password for login. The authconfig patch to add fingerprint reader authentication is also in rawhide.

Enrollment support is being added to gnome-about-me.

Detailed Description

Currently, using Fingerprint readers is a bit of a pain, and installing/using fprint and its pam module take more time than should ever be necessary.

Benefit to Fedora

Better Out-of-the-box experience for systems with fingerprint readers.

Scope

Better integration would mean

• Having a D-Bus service for handling reading/using the fingerprint reader.

• The PAM module uses the VerifyStart method provided over D-Bus to authenticate users, and will be added to the default configuration.

• gnome-about-me would use the EnrollStart method to write a new fingerprint data file for the specified user.

• gnome-screensaver would be able to use finger scans to unlock the desktop

• Any other dialog presented to the user for authentication would be able to use finger scans

• The create-user dialog in firstboot or its replacement could offer to enroll the new user

Test Plan

• Person installs a laptop/desktop system with a fingerprint-reader that's supported by fprint
• Person sets their fingerprint in gnome-about-me
• Person can log in using their fingerprint

Documentation

• Debian's fingerprint integration wiki
• Ubuntu's fingerprint integration wiki
• the fprint library

Dependencies

• libfprint and libusb1
• authconfig support
• fprintd with pam module

Contingency Plan

Not installing the packages by default.

Release Notes

FIXME

Comments and Discussion

See Talk:Features/Fingerprint

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