Whorlwind

A reactive wrapper around Android's fingerprint API that handles encrypting/decrypting sensitive data using a fingerprint.

DEPRECATED: Google has released the AndroidX Biometric Library which supports more forms of authentication than fingerprint and should be relied on going forward. See the announcement for more information.

Usage

Create an instance of Whorlwind by calling:

Whorlwind.create(context, storage, keyAlias)

You control where Whorlwind saves your encrypted data by providing a Storage. Whorlwind ships with a SharedPreferencesStorage if you want to store your data to shared preferences.

keyAlias is used when generating a key pair in the KeyStore and should not be shared with any other key aliases in your project.

All attempts to read/write from Whorlwind must be guarded by a call to canStoreSecurely(). This checks for necessary permissions and whether or not the fingerprint manager is available for use. The state of these requirements can change over the lifetime of your activity/application so it is not sufficient to check this once during activity/application creation.

Writing

Whorlwind handles encrypting the value for you so writing a new value is as simple as passing it to the write() method. However, be aware that Whorlwind will be performing cryptographic operations and may also perform some disk I/O regardless of your Storage implementation, so write() should not be called on the main thread.

if (whorlwind.canStoreSecurely()) {
  Observable.just("value")
      .observeOn(Schedulers.io())
      .flatMapCompletable(value -> whorlwind.write("key", ByteString.encodeUtf8(value)))
      .subscribe();
}

Reading

Whorlwind will handle activating the fingerprint reader and decrypting your data for you once you subscribe to the stream returned from read(). Similar to write(), read() should not be subscribed to on the main thread.

if (whorlwind.canStoreSecurely()) {
  whorlwind.read("key")
      .subscribeOn(Schedulers.io())
      .observeOn(AndroidSchedulers.mainThread())
      .subscribe(result -> {
        switch (result.readState) {
            case NEEDS_AUTH:
              // An encrypted value was found, prompt for fingerprint to decrypt.
              // The fingerprint reader is active.
              promptForFingerprint();
              break;
            case UNRECOVERABLE_ERROR:
            case AUTHORIZATION_ERROR:
            case RECOVERABLE_ERROR:
              // Show an error message. One may be provided in result.message.
              // Unless the state is UNRECOVERABLE_ERROR, the fingerprint reader is still
              // active and this stream will continue to emit result updates.
              showFingerprintMessage(result.code, result.message);
              break;
            case READY:
              if (result.value != null) {
                // Value was found and has been decrypted.
                showToast(result.value.utf8());
              } else {
                // No value was found. Fall back to password or fail silently, depending on
                // your use case.
                fingerprintFallback();
              }
              break;
            default:
              throw new IllegalArgumentException("Unknown state: " + result.readState);
          }
      });
}

Sample

A sample application is provided with a more comprehensive example.

Download

Gradle:

implementation 'com.squareup.whorlwind:whorlwind:2.1.0'

License

Copyright 2016 Square, Inc.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.