fingerprint-auth alone was not enough. /etc/pam.d/kde-fingerprint is written
for a Fedora/authselect layout and its auth stack is two lines: a substack of
fingerprint-auth followed by an include of postlogin. Alpine ships neither.
With only the first supplied, the fingerprint MATCHED and PAM still answered
Permission denied -- the include of a missing service failing after the match
had already succeeded, which is a confusing way to be told a file is absent.
The daemon's own log said MATCH while pamtester said no.
On Fedora postlogin does lastlog and umask bookkeeping. Nothing here needs
that; what is needed is that the seam exists and contributes nothing, so the
stack's result stays the one the fingerprint substack produced. Hence four
optional pam_permit lines and a comment explaining why it is deliberately
empty rather than merely unfinished.
Also observed while testing, and worth knowing before anyone calls this
broken: the lock screen arms fingerprint ONCE when it appears, waits 30
seconds -- pam_fprintd's own timeout -- and then cancels and falls back to a
password. Pressing outside that window reaches nothing at all, and the daemon
records it as `verify: cancelled over 0 press(es)`.
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.
Two things the packaging left behind.
A verify that ran its 600-frame budget without the sensor being touched was
reported to the client as verify-unknown-error. Nothing had gone wrong: nobody
had pressed. It cost three verifications during packaging, each reading as a
broken daemon. fprintd's contract is that a verify runs until the client stops
it, so the frame cap bounds one trustlet scan session rather than the user's
patience, and a window with no press simply runs again. Verified across the
rollover: 600 frames untouched, "still waiting", then a press matching on its
first contact frame in 44 ms.
Presses that happen and never reach a verdict now report verify-retry-scan --
a bad scan, which fprintd has a word for, and not the matcher saying no.
The cost is that an unanswered verify polls every ~200 ms for as long as the
client holds it. The cure is measured and available -- gpio75 is silent at
idle and bursts on contact -- but it would make the IRQ the only way a press
is ever noticed, deleting the poll under every rate this daemon has been
measured at. Noted where the loop waits, not done.
And the trustlet: focal64.mbn is a proprietary OEM-signed blob, so the package
ships a fp6-vendor-blobs manifest fragment instead, the same mechanism
soc-fairphone-fp6-audio uses for the amp config. It needed a new directive
there -- a QTEE image is an ELF header file plus one payload per program
header, not one file -- and reassembly on the phone reproduces the image QTEE
has accepted since August, byte for byte.
An aport, the units, and everything a phone needs to come up with a working
sensor without a single command being run by hand. Verified on the dev phone
across two reboots: modules-load.d loads qcomtee, tmpfiles builds the SFS
root, the mount unit brings up persist, and the daemon is ready 51 seconds
into the boot, owning net.reactivated.Fprint with the enrolled finger
visible.
The packaging shape is the one imsd uses for 81voltd. A versioned
provides="fprintd=..." satisfies plasma-workspace -- its Users KCM is the
enrolment UI and speaks exactly this bus name -- and excludes the real
fprintd, which is not tidiness: fprintd is D-Bus-activatable, so a client
call would otherwise start it and fight us for the name. The cost is the
fprintd-* CLIs, which go with the package.
fprintd-pam is an install_if subpackage pinned to the exact fprintd version,
so the provides breaks its condition and apk purges it -- taking pam_fprintd,
which is the entire point of the daemon, with it. Depending on it explicitly
is what keeps it, and it has no dependency on fprintd itself.
Two things the packaging exposed in the daemon:
The transcript is for experiments, not for a shipped daemon. A file per start
in an unrotated directory, recording the time of every unlock, to say what
the journal already has. It is now opt-in behind --log-dir, which is what
deploy-dev.sh passes since fplearn.sh reads it.
Taking it off the daemon path also took away the setvbuf it was doing as a
side effect of dup2'ing fd 1, and under systemd stdout is a pipe, which means
full buffering: the daemon started, worked, answered D-Bus calls, and printed
nothing. A working daemon that looks hung. stdout is now line-buffered from
the first line of main.
The config ships as generated by fp6fpcfg.py --daemon --verbose, sha256
b205c756914a66f1, because that is the file every accuracy number was measured
on. The quieter variant is untested and switching is a measurement.
The trustlet is not here and never will be: focal64.mbn is a proprietary
OEM-signed blob, and the unit's ConditionPathExists is what keeps the package
inert without it -- as it does on a kernel with no CONFIG_QCOMTEE.
