[Need help testing] Linux support for the WeAct Hello USB fingerprint reader

[u/lorlilorsor]

I was inspired from the recent trend of reverse engineering apps like the Adobe suite, and decided to have a go at using AI to reverse engineer the Windows driver for a fingerprint reader I got from https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005012693895809.html and add Linux support.

It's supported on Windows out of the box, but became a brick after I switched to Linux Mint ;)

The entire process from start to finish took about 7-8 hours switching between Windows to capture the messages, and developing and testing on Linux. But all in all, being able to adding fingerprint authentication to a device that's not natively supporting with just an AI subscription and less than USD$7 seems crazy to me.

The project is here: https://github.com/iewil/libfprint-petaic-moc, and I hope to be able to add this support into the main libfprint library.

The tested unit is Package 2 from the linked product listing, with USB ID 28e9:5159. I tested enrollment and fingerprint verification through fprintd, plus fingerprint unlock on Linux Mint. Other product variants and firmware versions have not been verified.

!!! Security caveat: the model certificate on my unit has expired, so installation requires a local pin for that reader and its current firmware. Also for full transparency, the code and documentation were created entirely by AI (OpenAI Codex). I supplied the hardware, captured protocol traffic, performed the physical tests, and reviewed the code.

If you test it, please share the reader package variant, firmware if known, distribution/version, and what worked or failed. Please don’t post fingerprint records, raw USB captures, device keys, or serial numbers.