Linux fingerprint sensor daemon for QTEE devices
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Filename Latest commit message Latest commit date
Jorijn van der Graaf 21d6aa448c Read the trustlet's own log, which on mainline means the response buffer
The matcher has been a black box that answers yes or no, and that is why "the
matcher saw a full-contact image of the enrolled finger and rejected it" went a
whole session with no explanation.

There is no tzdbg on mainline -- /sys/kernel/debug/tzdbg does not exist on this
kernel -- so the /proc/tzdbg/qsee_log route that captured the Android reference
log is unavailable, and the qcomtee qseelog ring is on record as wedging TZ. But
focal64 writes its log into the response buffer, which is how the research
harness printed it all along. --ta-log scans it, so the matcher's own verdicts
are readable on pmOS: auth success score, identify fail with the
FtVerifyByTemplate return, and the per-frame image quality, coverage and
humidity.

Turning it on taught three things, all of which are configuration rather than
code.

A log level is not enough. The trustlet answered "no key named
diagnosis.enable_algorithm_log, use default value" -- that switch and two
siblings are separate on/off gates that stock sets on and we had never sent at
all, so the algorithm log level was being applied to a stream that was off.

Lower is more verbose and 6 is off: level 0 produced 244 lines where 5 produced
far fewer. That settles a direction the config generator explicitly left open,
and it means the old verbose setting of 5 was very nearly a quiet one.

The ring is the scarce resource. It is about 150 lines per session and is never
reset, so the config dump alone overflows it: at framework level 0 the dump
produced 244 lines and UPDATE_TEMPLATE's own lines never arrived. The shipped
verbose config now leaves the framework log off and the algorithm log at 0,
which cut the init ring to 38 lines and reserves it for the matcher. Framework
tracing is a separate run and cannot also have the matcher's lines, and the
level cannot be raised later because 6 is unrecoverable by a runtime SYNC_CONFIG.
2026-09-03 17:46:20 +02:00
implementations Read the trustlet's own log, which on mainline means the response buffer 2026-09-03 17:46:20 +02:00
interfaces UPDATE_TEMPLATE: the command stock learns with, and the field that was killing it 2026-09-03 17:45:27 +02:00
packaging fpenrol.sh: no enrolment ever received the position guidance this script claims 2026-09-03 17:44:35 +02:00
tests UPDATE_TEMPLATE: the command stock learns with, and the field that was killing it 2026-09-03 17:45:27 +02:00
.gitignore Initial commit: the gpfile wire format, pinned by two real containers 2026-09-02 16:02:46 +02:00
LICENSE Initial commit: the gpfile wire format, pinned by two real containers 2026-09-02 16:02:46 +02:00
lint-rules.h Initial commit: the gpfile wire format, pinned by two real containers 2026-09-02 16:02:46 +02:00
project.cpp Become a daemon: a held session, a worker, and net.reactivated.Fprint 2026-09-02 22:10:51 +02:00
README.md README: what real use taught about the verify loop, and the revert 2026-09-02 23:19:24 +02:00

fingerprintd

Fingerprint daemon for the Fairphone 6 (milos, SM7635) on mainline Linux.

Why a daemon

The sensor is a FocalTech FT9391 on a TrustZone-owned SPI bus. spi@a88000 is disabled in both the mainline and the stock Android device tree, and the pads are XPU-protected — touching them from the normal world is an instant SError reboot. Every pixel the sensor produces stays inside the TEE: capture, preprocessing, the classifier, enrolment and matching all run in the focal64 trustlet, which reports a matched finger id and nothing else. A libfprint-style driver cannot exist on this device.

So the normal world's job is narrower than usual, and none of it is per-request work:

  • Power the sensor. Rail on gpio29, reset on gpio74, interrupt on gpio75 — the same division of labour the downstream driver uses. One sensor reset buys exactly one trustlet init, so whatever powers the sensor must also hold the session open.
  • Be QTEE's filesystem. QTEE cannot reach storage. When the trustlet saves or loads a template it calls back into the normal world through the gpfile (0x7000) and RPMB (0x2000) listeners, and expects them served. QTEE does the crypto and the anti-rollback; this side moves opaque bytes and performs the authenticated RPMB transactions against the UFS device.
  • Speak a biometrics API. The daemon owns net.reactivated.Fprint, so pam_fprintd, the Plasma fingerprint KCM and fprintd-enroll(1) work against it unmodified.

A listener registration is held for as long as the process lives and QTEE's listener table is global to the boot, so this has to be one long-lived process rather than a tool spawned per request.

Layout

interfaces/     Fingerprintd{,-Sfs}.cppm   the core: pure C++ modules
implementations/main.cpp                   the daemon shell
tests/                                     one suite per core module

fingerprintd-core is a static library with no GLib, no libqcomtee and no system headers. Everything in it is a wire format or a state machine that was recovered by reverse-engineering, so all of it is pinned by tests that run on a dev box with no phone, no TEE and no sensor. The daemon shell holds everything that touches hardware.

Build

crafter-build              # bin/fingerprintd-<target>-<march>/fingerprintd
crafter-build test         # the unit suites

Cross-compiling for the phone:

packaging/make-sysroot.sh                        # once; no root, no qemu, no device
crafter-build -- --target=aarch64-alpine-linux-musl \
  --sysroot=~/.cache/fingerprintd/sysroot-aarch64-alpine \
  --march=armv8-a --mtune=generic
crafter-build test --target=aarch64-alpine-linux-musl --sysroot=... \
  --march=armv8-a --mtune=generic                # runs the suites under qemu-aarch64

The result links dynamically against the phone's own musl and libc++ (libc++, libc++abi, libunwind, libgcc_s, all already present on pmOS). The research harness this replaces had to be built -static, but only because it was built with the host's glibc toolchain — that constraint does not apply to a real Alpine sysroot.

Verified on the device: all five suites pass cross-built and run on the phone itself, not only under emulation.

Status

It works end to end through fprintd's own clients. On the Fairphone 6, as a systemd unit owning net.reactivated.Fprint:

fprintd-enroll -f right-index-finger user   ten stages, enroll-completed
fprintd-list user                            - #0: right-index-finger
fprintd-verify user   (wrong finger)         verify-no-match, on the first press
fprintd-verify user   (enrolled finger)      verify-match,    on the first press

Nothing in fprintd was modified; the daemon speaks its interface.

module what it holds
:Sfs the gpfile frame — the read/write offset split, the O_TRUNC guard, root mapping, path-traversal rejection
:Rpmb request/reply framing, the bytes-transferred out-parameter, JEDEC result codes, chunking, the one-time-programmable key guard
:Ta command surface, the 740-byte event context, capture flags, save masks, enrol/auth payloads, the error table, the verdict rule
:Engine baseline calibration, touch edges, enrolment progress, the accounting
:Store the finger name map
:Tee QTEE service/op numbers, the listener table, the 13-byte CBOR credentials blob
:Sensor the pins, the timings, and the XPU guard

Every constant that was recovered by reverse-engineering carries where it came from, and the tests are written to fail if it is undone rather than to restate it. Several replay real captures off the phone.

Two policy decisions live in the daemon and both were forced by measurement. Verification is judged per press: any matching frame wins, only rejections is no-match — both correct presses in the acceptance run had rejected frames before the one that matched, so a first-frame rule would have failed them. And the shipped config sets max_authentication_rescan_times to 0, because at the stock budget a wrong finger never yields a terminal frame and a PAM client waits forever for the verify-no-match it needs.

Known about the loop, from real use. A verify frame is four QTEE round trips (~200 ms idle); a REPORT_EVENT that runs the matcher is ~300 ms, and the rising edge pays it twice because events 5 and 7 both reach the matcher. The first frame of a press is the finger landing and usually rejects; matches land at frame 3, 5, 8 — so a quick tap is often a miss. Two attempts to fix that (drop event 5; recapture after 50 ms) went in together and produced zero matches; both are reverted and recorded. gpio75 is a ~1 ms pulse, not a level — an IRQ-driven idle needs GPIO edge events. Changes to this loop are made one variable at a time, on a measured baseline.

Not done: packaging (provides="fprintd=…" so this replaces the fprintd daemon package while fprintd-pam stays), the shipped storage policy, polkit (a caller-uid rule stands in), trustlet-side template removal (deletes drop the name only), and the kernel config change — CONFIG_QCOMTEE, which selects the SHM bridge — that gates any public image. A claim held by a client that leaves the bus is dropped.

Runtime dependencies, not carried here

The focal64 trustlet is proprietary and is not in this repo. It is extracted from the device's own stock Android partition on first boot by the fp6-vendor-blobs mechanism, the same way the audio firmware is.