libfprint hacking guide for AES3500

libfprint is the fingerprint library for Linux, which offers a single API for application developers to access fingerprint devices. It includes a handful of drivers to support a wide range of devices.

This guide with related resource is setup to help further improve the driver for AES3500, as well as AES4000, both of which share a very similiar interface. The documents, debugging output, as well as code patches are collected and shared here for developers to easily pick it up and hack on it.

About AuthenTech AES3500 and AES4000

AES3500 is a pretty old fingerprint device produced by AuthenTech. It possesses a press-typed sensor of dimension in 128x128. While AES4000 has a dimension in 96x96.

The first driver code has been developed by Daniel Drake for AES4000. Then the support for AES3500 is later added by tunning params upon AES4000 driver (see debug/UsbSnoop.log).

At the moment, while there seems no problem scanning a fingerprint with the driver, the verification rate is unsatifyingly low. Thus it is considered work in progress. And your contributions are welcome.

Beyond libfprint, there was another (unmaintained) project biopod trying to bring AES3500 to Linux. And there's a hackish attempt to install it in OpenWrt.

What is included

|-- debug
|   |-- lsusb.txt    # description of usb interface
|   |-- spiked.log   # log translated to "readable" bytes
|   `-- UsbSnoop.log # a sniffed log of usb transfer in Windows
|-- doc
|   |-- aes3500-datasheet.pdf
|   `-- aes4000-datasheet.pdf
|-- README.md
`-- src
`-- aes3500.patch # code patches by `git format-patch`

The aes3500.patch would be empty, if the patch get merged into libfprint.

Getting started

You need to build and compile libfprint from latest code, with aes3500.patch applied. Then build and compile fprint_demo, which is a GUI application to test fingerprint capture and verify.

You may need those dependencies, on Debian-based distributions:

• build-essential
• libpam0g-dev
• libmagick++-dev
• libusb-1.0-0-dev
• libgtk2.0-dev
• libnss3-dev

Please follow these commands (# are comments):

# install the dependencies
$ sudo aptitude install build-essential libpam0g-dev libmagick++-dev
$ sudo aptitude install libusb-1.0-0-dev libgtk2.0-dev libnss3-dev

# build and compile libfprint
$ git clone https://github.com/juvenn/aes3500.git
$ git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/libfprint/libfprint
$ cd libfprint
$ git checkout -b myhack
# if there're patches
$ git apply ../aes3500/src/aes3500.patch
$ ./auotgen.sh
$ make
# install to /usr/local
$ sudo make install # install to /usr/local

# build and compile fprint_demo
$ cd ..
$ git clone https://github.com/dsd/fprint_demo
$ cd fprint_demo
$ ./autogen.sh
# load libfprint library from /usr/local
$ ./configure PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH
$ make
$ sudo make install

Then you're ready to go:

$ sudo fprint_demo

Share

Please share the documents you find, the useful log you produce, and the tools that might be helpful. Code patches should be submitted to libfprint project directly.

For discussions, please join us on fprint@lists.freedesktop.org.

---

Thanks Rafael Toledo for the Windows driver and the help.

http://www.reactivated.net/weblog-content/20050806-reverse-0.2.txt