Linux fingerprint sensor daemon for QTEE devices
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  • Shell 11.4%
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Jorijn van der Graaf ffad29ba4e Port the trustlet command surface, and pin the counting rule to recorded runs
Fingerprintd:Ta is the second core module: request payloads, response fields,
the error table, and the rule that decides what a frame meant. Payload building
and response reading only -- no TEE, no transport.

Very little of this is guessable, so each constant carries where it came from.
Three were found only because QTEE recorded a fault naming the instruction that
read them:

  * the event context's scan-slot count at +712, which do_enroll branches on to
    skip the entire slot loop -- an all-zero payload logged "groups->,
    results->" and read exactly like a gate failing deep in the trustlet, when
    it was zero iterations;
  * CAPTURE_IMAGE's flags at payload+0x18, without which preprocessing, the
    classifier and the enrol grouper never run at all, whatever is on the
    sensor;
  * SYNC_STATISTICS, whose absence leaves g_statistics NULL so the first enrol
    frame that gets far enough takes a data abort and every later command
    answers -90.

The verdict rule gets the most attention because it was mislabelled three times
before the comparison producing it was read. A frame is one of three things and
only the third is a verdict: the poison intact means the matcher never ran,
rc=-11 means not identified yet with attempts remaining, and only rc=0 carries
a match or a rejection. The poison exists because a zero-initialised buffer
cannot tell a released finger from a rejected one.

The tests are in two halves that cannot prop each other up. Explicit wire
conditions pin the classifier; three recorded runs pin the counting policy,
which is what actually went wrong. In the stock-budget run 31 of 48 frames
answered "not identified yet" and every frame that carried an image matched --
counting those 31 as attempts turns 8-for-8 into 8-of-39 and reads as a flaky
sensor. The wrong-finger control pins zero false accepts.

Fixtures are verdict-line excerpts, not the 40 KB transcripts, which are thick
with the device's SFS container names the test has no use for.

Verified by mutation: classifying -11 as a rejection, dropping SYNC_STATISTICS
from the init chain, and forgetting the +0x10 response payload offset each fail
the suite.
2026-09-02 16:46:00 +02:00
implementations Initial commit: the gpfile wire format, pinned by two real containers 2026-09-02 16:02:46 +02:00
interfaces Port the trustlet command surface, and pin the counting rule to recorded runs 2026-09-02 16:46:00 +02:00
tests Port the trustlet command surface, and pin the counting rule to recorded runs 2026-09-02 16:46:00 +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 Port the trustlet command surface, and pin the counting rule to recorded runs 2026-09-02 16:46:00 +02:00
README.md Initial commit: the gpfile wire format, pinned by two real containers 2026-09-02 16:02:46 +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:

crafter-build -- --target=aarch64-alpine-linux-musl \
  --sysroot=<alpine-aarch64-sysroot> --march=armv8-a --mtune=generic
crafter-build test --target=aarch64-alpine-linux-musl

Status

Early. The core is being ported one wire format at a time out of the research harness that first made the sensor work (utilities/fpta.c in the fp6 repo), each piece landing with tests before the next starts. Fingerprintd:Sfs — the gpfile frame — is done. The daemon itself does not run yet.

The working reference enrols a finger, keeps it across a reboot, and matches it with zero false accepts; the port exists to turn that into a service rather than to rediscover it.

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.