On Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:33:32 -0400 John C Nash <nashjc [ at ] uottawa [ dot ] ca> wrote: > Anyone know if they can be accessed in Linux? Or willing to play a bit. > I'm willing to part with one if someone thinks they can get the reader > going. (Would wine be an option?) Even as a USB drive they are an OK > value. Nice lanyard too. I've done some poking around with this kind of thing in the past, but not with this specific model. I'd expect to find two partitions on this thing: one encrypted, one not. Though it's entirely possible you can merge them into one partition, it's likely that the stick won't let you do this. But the unencrypted partition should be readily available for use. As an educated guess, I'd say that the fingerprint reader simply acts as fancy input for a hash algorithm -- nothing more. It would then pass this hash off to the software, which would do all authentication and encryption on the PC, not in the flash drive. (It's extremely rare to see proper, self-contained encryption in a flash drive.) Which means, in order to get these things to work under Linux, you'd essentially have to re-implement the protocol, then figure out how to talk to the flash drive to gain access to the encrypted partition (assuming one exists). That's a guess, though -- I could be way off the mark. Now, in theory, this should be relatively straightforward. Well, getting the fingerprint reader to work, that is: if we assume that the reader is just a dumb hashing interface, then we can assume all it really does is spit data out over the USB interface. Simply sniffing this should give you all the information you need, in order to get fingerprint data. If, indeed, special commands are sent to the device to permit access to a "locked" partition, this would be a bit trickier, but not entirely impossible. All that being said, I suspect if you search around enough, you'll find that someone, somewhere has broken the security on these things, and you can likely use that as a starting point. - Damian