fprint

The fprint project aims to plug a gap in the Linux desktop: support for consumer fingerprint reader devices.

Previously, Linux support for such devices has been scattered amongst different projects (many incomplete) and inconsistent in that application developers would have to implement support for each type of fingerprint reader separately. For more information on where we came from, see ?/Project history.

We're trying to change that by providing a central system to support all the fingerprint readers we can get our hands on. The software is open source and in the long term we're shooting for adoption by distributions, integration into common desktop environments, etc.

Projects

libfprint

libfprint is the centre of our efforts. libfprint is the component which does the dirty work of talking to fingerprint reading devices, and processing fingerprint data.

If you're a user, you probably aren't interested in libfprint, instead you want to find some software which uses libfprint (see the integration project).

If you're an application developer looking to add support for some kind of fingerprinting to your software, libfprint is exactly what you are looking for. It provides a simple API for you to enroll fingerprints and then identify users later on.

libfprint homepage

Integration

The Integration project details our efforts to integrate libfprint with existing applications, so that users can use their fingerprint reading hardware.

Integration homepage

fprint_demo

fprint demo is a simple GUI application used to demonstrate and test libfprint's capabilities.

fprint demo homepage

fprintd

fprintd is a daemon that provides fingerprint scanning functionality over D-Bus.

fprintd homepage

News

2008-11-23: Bastien Nocera has been doing a lot of work on fprintd and has put out a request for testing in Fedora.
2008-08-07: Wolfgang Ullrich announces a libfprint-based Qt fingerprint scanning GUI
2008-05-06: Academic project report published
2008-04-01: Portuguese article about fprint at Vivao Linux
2008-03-20: /libfprint v0.0.6 released
2008-01-24: IRC Channel #fprint is now on at freenode (irc.freenode.org)
2007-12-07: /libfprint v0.0.5 released
2007-11-22: We're featured in LWN! Also released /libfprint v0.0.4 and /fprint demo v0.4.
2007-11-19: More releases: /libfprint v0.0.3, /pam fprint v0.2 and /fprint demo v0.3
2007-11-18: /fprint demo v0.2 released.
2007-11-17: /libfprint v0.0.2 and /fprint demo v0.1 released.
2007-11-15: /libfprint v0.0.1 and /pam fprint v0.1 released.
2007-11-15: Project announced to the public and also on my weblog.
2007-11-13: This poster is on display in my university department and provides a brief introduction to the project and its goals.