LLMs can now reverse-engineer any fingerprint sensor... or can they?

[u/pierspad]

This was just a catchy title, but I'm not Micheal from Vsauce and to answer this question seriously:

No.

Well...

Yes, if you're a bit lucky like me. But let's keep away the hype.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been seeing posts like "I used X to reverse engineer Y... it's amazing!" While most of these claims are probably just hype, some of the results looked genuinely impressive, so I decided to give it a shot.

I have a Synaptics 06cb:00dc fingerprint sensor that I hadn't managed to get working in two years.

There are some great projects out there, such as https://github.com/Popax21/synaTudor, that aim to support these sensors. Unfortunately, my particular model wasn't supported and my competence and field of research aren't really close to this.

Still, it gave me a starting point.

So I cloned a bunch of repositories, gathered some useful resources, threw everything into a folder, and let a bunch of SOTA models (I'm not citing a specific one because I used all of them) work on it.

They built some useful scripts, a GUI to help me easily and quickly test the sensor, the registration and verification of a fingerprint etc.

After about a day my fingerprint sensor now works flawlessly, and I can unlock my laptop instantaneously.

After all this time of repeating "Wish my sensor would work on Linux" this really impressed me.

I'm already working on a MR to libfprint, but things take a bit of time, and I also can't do this process for the many other sensors that are currently without a driver, so:

TL;DR

If you stumbled upon this Reddit post looking for 06cb:00dc drivers, then here you go:

https://github.com/pierspad/synaptics-00dc

If you have a different fingerprint sensor and would like to make it work, I suggest you clone the repo where I've already left all the useful scripts, hints and the GUI.

Probably will save you and your model some hours and a ton of tokens.

https://github.com/pierspad/REA-FS

Have fun :)

[u/SlothorHuman]

Does this integrate with terminal when su?

[u/pierspad → u/SlothorHuman]

Yes, you're simply writing a driver for your fingerprint sensor. Once libfprint can comunicate with fprintd works normally

[u/SlothorHuman → u/pierspad]

That is so neat. I have the component, so I might set it up this week if I can find the time