I cannot seem to register a Biometric unlock in settings for Chrome OS. Although having a fingerprint enables Chromebook.
Thanks
Thanks for checking in! The Browser extension is trying to communicate with the desktop app for the Biometrics integration which is currently not available on ChromeOS.
Thanks, Dwbit for your reply.
Are there plans to do a native Chrome OS app to allow Chromebook users to take advantage from Biometrics in Chrome OS.
Thank you for your support.
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I would also like to know if there will be a native chromeOS app so biometrics can be taken advantage of. With Chromebooks becoming more and more widely used, especially in schools, it would be nice to utilize the hardware they are starting to add to the new generation of Chromebooks.
I am not 100% sure, but I think a browser (Chrome included) extension should be able to access Biometrics just like a regular web application without communicating to any desktop application. Can you have your engineering team looking into this?
@ChihweiLHBird Welcome to the forum!
No, it is not possible for a browser extension to do this without communicating with a desktop app. If you have evidence to the contrary, please share.
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Wouldn’t it work with Web Authentication API that allows websites to communicate with a local authenticator like Windows Hello?
Evidently not.
ChromeOS allows webauthn sign in with fingerprints (or device pin) (Chromebooks will now let you sign into websites with your fingerprint | ZDNET). Leveraging the webauthn API, it should be possible to implement “fingerprint unlock” without the desktop extension (at least on windows/chromeos, and assuming that those webauthn implementations support PRF) but that feature would then rather be “Webauthn-based unlock for the browser extension” (which happens to also add support for fingerprint unlock on chrome os).
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@Quexten
Yea, agreed. The only question remains in my mind is whether WebAuthn API is accessible from a browser extension (which is not a regular website). I think it’s very likely though.
At least in chromium, it is possible (824383 - chromium - An open-source project to help move the web forward. - Monorail), no idea about firefox/(safari), though the latter part does not matter at least for chromeos.
@Quexten Thanks for the info!
I think this topic can become a larger scope WebAuthn support feature request not only for browser extensions but also for the Bitwarden Web App (https://vault.bitwarden.com/).
Login for the web-app is already being developed and there are experimental pull requests for this. Unlock is not yet a tracked feature request as far as I know.