Oh nice, I have a Carbon X1. I knew that fprintd has worked for a while, and has allowed me to enroll fingerprints, but has never successfully worked for authentication.
And I'm sure that there's a completely closed, separated and proprietary subsystem in your CPU that has access to everything happening on your computer. Literally everything, all input and output, everything the CPU is doing, just everything. Look up Intel ME or AMD PSP
System 76 laptop has fingerprint sensor. They don't say it has one cuz it's not supported.
And since it's designed to be used as a tap/scan, and power button only on hard restart/shutdown it's hard to press to stop it being pressed on fingerprint scan, the hardware not being supported means you have to press the power button a lot instead of fingerprint.
Fwiw they’re able to do the same thing by the sound of someone typing a password across the room. Not advocating for fingerprints or anything, just these exotic hacks are everywhere
With a password you can have an exact binary comparison. Either you supplied the correct password or you didn't.
But with biometrics you just have an approximation because your fingerprints change slightly due to the position in which you hold them, your health, humidity, pressure and probably other stuff I'm not thinking of. So the sensor can only say that it's like 95 % or whatever sure that it got the correct fingerprint. And this uncertainty makes it much easier to exploit.
And your fingerprint is not secret. You leave it all over the place. Especially on devices you use every day. And your fingerprint can (and will) be taken without your consent. And you cannot change your fingerprint if it gets compromised.
All those spy movies showing how trivial it is to circumvent biometric security have in common that whatever method they used was realistic.
I use it if only because my wife won't use passwords on her devices. We aren't even at step one for device security. I'll take what I can get, or what she's willing to work with.
And that's because your laptop is a thinkpad, indeed I got my fingerprint reader working on my ideapad because it has the same fingerprint reader of a thinkpad, but to get it working I needed to install the driver myself
Weirdly enough, I've never got fprint working on my thinkpad (albeit I've only attempted twice).
Both times, it works fine whenever I only set up my index finger. Adding my thumb (or any other finger) then prevents either from working, removing either finger removes both, and then prevents me from adding it back.
I have no idea why I'm having this issue, but I'm assuming I'm just missing something.
I've had good luck with the fingerprint scanners in various HP business laptops and fprint. The one on my old Dell laptop was straight-up unsupported though.
I have a windows laptop with a fingerprint sensor that worked exactly like this lol
I'd reinstall the driver, it would work for a day, then stop working. One day I updated the laptop to Windows 11 and I think it fixed it, but is it worth the ads coming soon? I will see.
I stopped using them altogether when my job provisioned a YubiKey. Got one for personal usage and it's pretty solid for just about everything I'd have used a fingerprint sensor for.