On Thu, 2007-10-25 at 08:55 -0400, Bryan Clark wrote:
Pushing off from Ben's email on new user creation [1] I wanted to
get
some setup for the think finger support that david mentioned [2].
I'd actually like to make it a teensy bit more general and think about
the non-Thinkfinger readers also. From my Pile Of Laptops, the
Authentec readers are pretty common. And davidz has already done some
prodding with them based on his blog ;)
While not very relevant to the interaction, it's mostly important so
that we don't make assumptions of hardware capabilities that may or may
not be present.
Can it's presence be detected automatically? And it's (pam)
authentication be added automatically?
They're all usb devices, so pretty detectable. Adding the pam config is
just a matter of deciding we're doing it and then adding to the stacks
written out by authconfig
How many times does it take to train think finger support initially?
This probably depends on the hardware. Thinkfinger is 3 swipes and
trained in hardware. Some of the other readers just give you back an
image and you have to do verification[1] on your own. But probably 3 is
a reasonable guess there too. It's at least the range of "more than
one, less than many"
Can it be (re)trained incrementally? Is this required?
Nope, you pretty much have to do the initial readings upfront.
Can we get the image from think finger for user feedback? Ray
mentioned
we might be able to fake it, which would probably be good enough.
This is definitely going to be dependent on the hardware, so probably
can't be counted on.
Can we detect / remember the number of failed think finger attempts
before a successful one? This is related to retraining, if it's
possible to retrain the reader or human to scan better over time.
PAM doesn't usually keep track of a number of failures. You could have a module do
it, though if you really wanted I think.
Jeremy