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Give a finger a meaning beyond "it was you"

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The trustlet has always reported WHICH finger matched and the daemon only ever
used it to answer yes. A table in /etc/fingerprintd/actions.conf now gives each
finger a meaning: run a command as root, tell the user's session, or report
no-match while doing one of those anyway -- which is duress, where the phone
should look like it simply did not recognise the finger.

Two rules shaped the design.

Root does not launch applications. The daemon has no session bus, no display
and no user environment, so a `session` rule carries no command at all: the
daemon emits net.catcrafts.Fingerprintd1.FingerMatched(finger, uid) and an
agent in the user's own session decides what that means from the user's own
configuration. The only commands in the file are ones root is meant to run.

Which makes the file a root shell, and the parser treats it as one. It is
refused outright unless root owns it and nobody else can write it, group
included. A malformed line rejects the WHOLE file rather than being skipped:
applying the prefix would leave a policy nobody wrote, and the missing half
could be the one that mattered. That property is tested, and the test caught it
being false the first time -- rules accumulated before the bad line survived
the rejection.

A system command must be an absolute path, because resolving a bare name
through PATH makes what root runs depend on an environment this daemon does not
control. It is double-forked with a scrubbed environment so an action may
outlive the daemon (a reboot) without ever stalling the worker thread that is
the only thread allowed to touch the trustlet.

Ordering is deliberate: the verdict override happens before the client is told,
because that is the point of duress; the session signal and the root command
happen after, on the same principle that keeps the harvest and the save off the
unlock path.

No actions.conf ships. An example goes to /usr/share/doc, because shipping a
root shell nobody asked for is not a default.

Not yet exercised on hardware.
This commit is contained in:
Jorijn van der Graaf 2026-09-05 05:12:41 +02:00
commit 928fe1482e
10 changed files with 582 additions and 6 deletions
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32
packaging/fingerprint-auth.pam Normal file
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#%PAM-1.0
# SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-only
# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: Copyright (C) 2026 Catcrafts®
#
# The service kscreenlocker's /etc/pam.d/kde-fingerprint substacks, and which
# nothing on Alpine provides -- so on a stock pmOS image every fingerprint
# unlock fails before it reaches any daemon, with PAM unable to open the
# substack rather than anything about fingerprints. kscreenlocker ships
# kde-fingerprint (auth/account/password/session all `include fingerprint-auth`)
# and Alpine ships pam_fprintd, and the file joining them is simply absent.
#
# It lives in the vendor directory /usr/lib/pam.d, next to Alpine's own
# base-auth, so an administrator can still override it in /etc/pam.d.
#
# fingerprintd ships it because fingerprintd is what makes it mean anything:
# this package provides fprintd, so it owns the bus name pam_fprintd talks to.
# pam_fprintd asks the daemon to verify, prompting through the PAM
# conversation; sufficient, so a match ends the stack successfully and a
# failure falls through to pam_deny rather than to a password -- the caller
# (kde-fingerprint) is the one that decides whether to offer a password next.
auth required pam_env.so
auth sufficient pam_fprintd.so
auth required pam_deny.so
account include base-account
# A fingerprint cannot set a password, and kde-fingerprint includes this
# service for `password` as well.
password required pam_deny.so
session include base-session