Hacker News Reader

Comment by erklik | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty sweet. I feel like the only thing is that Windows Hello, and other fingerprint/face scanning tech is pretty slow compared to typing in a password, so doubt i'll be using it anytime soon. This is still very interesting from a technical pov.

I know nothing of PAM, but could it be used with something like LDAP? or ActiveDirectory?

View on HN

Both face and fingerprint authenticate in under a second on all the machines I use.

If the machine is joined to a domain you'd need to use Hello for Business. It's more involved to set up, but if you've got enough Windows computers to have an AD domain you should definitely do it.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/identity-p...

I used Windows Hello for about a year with a Razer Stargazer (IR Camera) and was always impressed with how quickly it was able to auth me, no matter if I was wearing glasses or not. Less than a second for me too, and that camera does not have the fastest start time, from camera init to capturing from both RGB and IR cameras.

At first I was skeptical about the usefulness of such a feature given my password doesn't take long to type, but it turned it to be a feature I really enjoyed.

I have a IR camera built into my Dell Latitude. It's suprising at how quick it is. The only catch is that I'm usually loocking at my monitor and have to turn to the laptop for it to pick up.

yep! PAM is "Pluggable Authentication Module" which sits between applications and the auth method, so you can put anything there. LDAP and ActiveDirectory are fairly common ones

Is there any library like PAM in the Windows ecosystem?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/secauthn/cred...

Not exactly. You can create custom authentication methods and prompts, but it's architected differently. (I think Local Security Authority (LSA) and Credential Providers are the keywords to search for details)

Used to be called GINA. In addition to sibling comments, see: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/secauthn/winl...

> This is pretty sweet. I feel like the only thing is that Windows Hello, and other fingerprint/face scanning tech is pretty slow compared to typing in a password

My Dell Vostro has pretty instantaneous fingerprint recognition, much faster than a password (my previous Acer has a less convenient location for the sensor, and was much slower, and was much less reliable.)

On my gygabyte aero, the fingerprint is almost instantaneous

Reply on news.ycombinator.com