plasma-face-unlock

Face ID for KDE Plasma.

Look at the screen and it unlocks: the lock screen, sudo and admin prompts. A photo of you is not enough.

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

Come back to your locked screen and look at it. A bubble drops down at the top, finds your face, and you are in. It works for sudo and Plasma's admin prompts too, if you want. Everything runs on your computer, and your face is saved as numbers, never as a picture.

Install

Arch, CachyOS, EndeavourOS, Manjaro (AUR)

yay -S plasma-face-unlock

Fedora 44

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 13

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/trixie ./" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plasma-face-unlock.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install plasma-face-unlock

Kubuntu 26.04

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/resolute ./" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/plasma-face-unlock.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install plasma-face-unlock

Updates then come with your normal system updates.

You need Plasma 6 on Wayland and a camera. Infrared cameras (the Windows Hello kind) work too.

How to use

plasma-face-unlock

This opens a menu. Press 1 and follow the setup window: look at the camera, then turn your head slowly in a circle until the ring is full. Then lock the screen and look at it.

Key
1	Turn face unlock on or off
2	Add another face, for example with glasses
3	Rename, turn off or delete faces
4	Settings: sudo, admin prompts, photo check, camera, bubble style, animation speed and more
5	One test scan that shows what the camera sees. Try this first when something does not work.

Without the menu: plasma-face-unlock enable, disable, setup [NAME], faces, remove ID, test and status.

Is it safe?

It is a convenience, not a security upgrade. Face ID on a phone sees your face in 3D. A webcam only sees a flat picture.

• A photo does not get in: the face has to blink or turn a little, and a photo can do neither.
• A phone or tablet held up to the camera is caught by its reflection and its straight edges.
• A video of you can still get in.
• Five failed tries in a row pause it for 15 minutes, or until you use your password.
• Only root can read your face data. Adding or deleting a face always needs your password.
• sudo and admin prompts never take a face over SSH.

If the computer guards something important, leave sudo and admin prompts off.

How it works

plasma-face-unlockd	Runs as root when needed. It owns the camera and the face data and decides.
plasma-face-unlock-agent	Runs in your session. It watches the lock screen and draws the bubble.
pam_plasma_face_unlock.so	Lets sudo and admin prompts ask the daemon. No match: you type your password as usual.
plasma-face-unlock	The menu.

Two small networks from the OpenCV model zoo find the face (YuNet) and turn it into numbers (SFace). They run on the CPU in a few milliseconds. The lock screen is unlocked through logind, the same way loginctl unlock-session does it. man plasma-face-unlock has all the details.

Build from source

make models   # downloads the two networks and checks them
make
make test
sudo make install

You need CMake, a C++20 compiler, Qt 6, LayerShellQt, KI18n, OpenCV 4.5.4 or newer (with DNN), Linux-PAM and libsystemd. scdoc and msgfmt are optional (man page, translations). packaging/README.md explains releases.

Credits

• Glance by Jonathan Zhou (MIT): face unlock for the Mac. The idea, the look of the bubble and the photo check come from there. The code here is new.
• YuNet (MIT) and SFace (Apache-2.0) from the OpenCV model zoo.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later.