From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932367AbWGED65 (ORCPT ); Tue, 4 Jul 2006 23:58:57 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932386AbWGED65 (ORCPT ); Tue, 4 Jul 2006 23:58:57 -0400 Received: from mail.tmr.com ([64.65.253.246]:5091 "EHLO pixels.tmr.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932367AbWGED64 (ORCPT ); Tue, 4 Jul 2006 23:58:56 -0400 Message-ID: <44AB3988.1050308@tmr.com> Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2006 00:01:12 -0400 From: Bill Davidsen User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060516 SeaMonkey/1.0.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Alan Cox CC: Greg KH , Alon Bar-Lev , kernelnewbies@nl.linux.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Driver for Microsoft USB Fingerprint Reader References: <9e0cf0bf0607030304n62991dafk19f09e41d69e9ab0@mail.gmail.com> <44A95F12.8080208@gmail.com> <20060703214509.GA5629@kroah.com> <1151966154.16528.42.camel@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <1151966154.16528.42.camel@localhost.localdomain> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org 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 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.