Re: Driver for Microsoft USB Fingerprint Reader

[Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>]

Alan Cox wrote:
> 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.

Crude, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I like hardware which 
does as little as possible because I can then apply the appropriate 
software to the data. I can see that if cost is no object and the 
algorithm is never going to change, I can build all that stuff into the 
device. But I don't need to... as long as I can take the data, pass it 
through a transform, and get out of that a key which works or not, then 
I can do useful things with it.

Useful includes many things. I'm playing with using a combined secret 
and SecureID(tm) to decrypt and boot a virtual machine, such that I can 
do many unrelated things and have reduced chance of "unintended data 
migration." It also allows ad-hoc users (read that as undergrads) given 
a temporary machine fairly easily, visiting professors, etc.

I can see the benefits of having the whole package be a black box, I 
hope I have explained why I find even a dumb scanner useful in some cases.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
   Obscure bug of 2004: BASH BUFFER OVERFLOW - if bash is being run by a
normal user and is setuid root, with the "vi" line edit mode selected,
and the character set is "big5," an off-by-one errors occurs during
wildcard (glob) expansion.