From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932157AbWGCWTE (ORCPT ); Mon, 3 Jul 2006 18:19:04 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932155AbWGCWTE (ORCPT ); Mon, 3 Jul 2006 18:19:04 -0400 Received: from outpipe-village-512-1.bc.nu ([81.2.110.250]:16873 "EHLO lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932157AbWGCWTC (ORCPT ); Mon, 3 Jul 2006 18:19:02 -0400 Subject: Re: Driver for Microsoft USB Fingerprint Reader From: Alan Cox To: Daniel Bonekeeper Cc: Greg KH , Alon Bar-Lev , kernelnewbies@nl.linux.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org In-Reply-To: References: <9e0cf0bf0607030304n62991dafk19f09e41d69e9ab0@mail.gmail.com> <44A95F12.8080208@gmail.com> <20060703214509.GA5629@kroah.com> Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Mon, 03 Jul 2006 23:35:54 +0100 Message-Id: <1151966154.16528.42.camel@localhost.localdomain> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Evolution 2.6.2 (2.6.2-1.fc5.5) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Ar Llu, 2006-07-03 am 18:11 -0400, ysgrifennodd Daniel Bonekeeper: > That's one problem: I don't want to create one more userspace > interface for that. I suppose that all the hundreds of fingerprint > readers that ships with a SDK have their own way of doing that.. that The very cheap readers all appear to be fairly crude image scanners, and they even lack hardware encryption/perturbation so they are actually of very limited value. > looks awfull to me, even though I believe that currently there isn't > any uniform way of working with fingerprint readers... shouldn't we > have a way to classify devices ? For example, if I want to list all They vary from "low res bitmap" and the rest in software through "low res bitmap mangled by specific device instance unique scheme" (1) through to smart card based external tamperproof boxes that authenticate the smartcard with the fingerprint and the host typically via PAM in user space. That's a huge range of devices with little in common. Alan (1) Think about what happens if you don't have this. Its possible to steal a result then reverse engineer a "finger" on your own laptop to produce the same result.