[2005] Utilizing fingerprint swiper thingymajig cool thing on Lenovo ThinkPad

[timeshifter]

So... my boss and I were going through a huge checklist of things that need to be taken care of to be considered "PCI Compliant", in other words, legally allowed to handle credit card information. It's a 40-page checklist. Two hour lunch break. With quite a bit of humor involved. A few points in a row referenced splitting up a master encryption key into pieces, and charging several people with a different piece, so everyone has to be together to get at any information. Great idea, except that this company has 2 developers.... him and me. So it kinda deteriorated into "how secure can we make this operation?"

Both of us have Lenovo ThinkPads... built-in microphones, fingerswiperthingys, and my model has a built-in camera, but he could get one pretty easily, too.

To provide the utmost in security measures... if anything needs to be seen, both of us have to swipe our fingers at the same time, pass a retina scan and voice recognition, enter our piece of the encryption, press enter, and turn the key. All at once.

Yeah, maybe we had a bit too much fun with that.

Anyway, it got me thinking... wouldn't it be cool to have a security system that required two people to swipe fingers at the same time? How plausible do you think it would be to write a program that when launched on two machines within a network, detected the other machine, both programs synced up, and would only unlock "whatever" if both people swiped and passed their fingerprints?

Farfetched, I know, but my twisted mind thinks it'd be fun... and funny... because next comes integrating a key to turn...

[kleinma]

for starters you would need to have the API for the fingerprint hardware. Not sure if they expose that API for the very fact of security itself...

If you want to actually do something like this, you would need to first be able to interact with the fingerprint hardware at the local level of the PC, in terms of capturing and validating the given fingerprint. Then you could worry about your 007 plan to secure the nuclear missles... err I mean data

[timeshifter]

Yeah, I figured it'd be something like that... I'd have to get pretty bored to tackle this kind of issue...