[fprint] How to use fingerprint for Bios ?

[Michael Stephenson]

On Fri, 2009-10-16 at 21:12 +0330, a dehqan wrote:
> 
> In The Name Of God The compassionate merciful
> 
> Good day everyone ;
> Thanks for your attentioIn ;
> 
> On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 5:25 PM, <mickstephenson at googlemail.com>
> wrote:
>         
>         
>         I imagine it is likely that it is really actually the data on
>         your hard drive you wish to secure, in which case you are
>         going about it the wrong way, you should encrypt your home
>         partition which would require a password to be entered at boot
>         when linux attempts to mount your home partition, that way all
>         your browsing habits and personal data will be secure if
>         someone gets their hands on your hardware.
> 
> According to this page how to enable FDE ? 
> http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Full_Disk_Encryption_(FDE)
> 
> Then in the middle of page is written :
> 
> TPM 
> It should be possible to use TPM (with fingerprint readers...) not
> tested yet.
> 
>       * T61 with TPM & fingerprints, FDE password works with a
>         configured fingerprint but you must use windows based software
>         to program the imprint. By keeping a small windows partition,
>         I am able to boot linux with a fingerprint, fingerprint passes
>         the TPM power-on password AND the FDE disk 1 password, which
>         is separate.
> He/She has mntioned that it is possible to use ,but how ?
> 
> Regards dehqan
> 

Ignore that method, it involves using Windows software, if it is indeed
only the personal data in you home directory you are wishing to secure
with encryption as I previously suggested, you should use a method such
as this:
http://polishlinux.org/howtos/encrypted-home-partition-in-linux/
Using this method you can use PAM to decrypt your partition upon login,
and since fprint is integrated into PAM you can authenticate using a
fingerprint device. I suggest you use Fedora 11 which already ships a
fingerprint enabled gdm.

Michael