plasma-face-unlock

plasma-face-unlock

Face ID for KDE Plasma.

Unlock the lock screen, sudo and admin prompts with your face.

Install | How to use | Is it safe? | Report a bug

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The bubble drops down over the lock screen, the face in it looks around, and two green rings spin and land around a tick

The bubble above the lock screen: looking, recognised, not recognised

Install

Arch, CachyOS, EndeavourOS, Manjaro
yay -S plasma-face-unlock
Fedora
sudo curl -fsSL -o /etc/yum.repos.d/plasma-face-unlock.repo \
  https://loonixtools.github.io/plasma-face-unlock/plasma-face-unlock.repo
sudo dnf install plasma-face-unlock
Debian, Kubuntu
codename="$(sed -n 's/^VERSION_CODENAME=//p' /etc/os-release)"
sudo install -d -m 0755 /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://loonixtools.github.io/plasma-face-unlock/KEY.gpg \
  | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/plasma-face-unlock.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/plasma-face-unlock.gpg] https://loonixtools.github.io/plasma-face-unlock/deb/$codename ./" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plasma-face-unlock.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install plasma-face-unlock

Needs Plasma 6 on Wayland and a camera. Updates come with your system updates.

How to use

plasma-face-unlock

The plasma-face-unlock menu in Konsole: face unlock on, one face, lock screen, sudo and admin prompts on

Press 1 and look at the camera. Then lock the screen and look at it.

Settings

The settings in Konsole, grouped into lock screen, password prompts, recognition and bubble, with the photo check explained at the bottom

Is it safe?

A convenience, not extra security. A webcam only sees a flat picture.

Photo or video on a phone, tablet or glossy screen ✅ Stopped
Matte printed photo ⚠️ Only stopped with photo check strict
Video of you on a big matte screen ❌ Can get in
Five failed tries ⏸️ Paused for 15 minutes
Your face data 🔒 Numbers, no pictures. Root only.
sudo over SSH 🚫 Never unlocked by a face

More

How it works
plasma-face-unlockd The root service. Owns the camera and the face data.
plasma-face-unlock-agent Runs in your session. Watches the lock screen, draws the bubble.
pam_plasma_face_unlock.so Lets sudo and admin prompts ask the service.
plasma-face-unlock The menu.

Two small networks from the OpenCV model zoo run on the CPU: YuNet finds the face, SFace turns it into numbers. All details: man plasma-face-unlock.

Build from source
make models
make
make test
sudo make install

Needs CMake, a C++20 compiler, Qt 6, LayerShellQt, KI18n, OpenCV 4.5.4+ (with DNN), Linux-PAM and libsystemd.

Credits

  • Glance by Jonathan Zhou: the idea and the look of the bubble.
  • YuNet and SFace from the OpenCV model zoo.

GPL-3.0-or-later.

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Description
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Readme GPL-3.0
5 MiB
0 Stars 1 Watchers 0 Forks
v2.1.0
Latest
2026-10-04 20:29:03 +02:00
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