Hi Daniel,

Thank you for contacting us, and I'm sorry for the issue you are experiencing. I'm not sure what could be happening here, as there are only a few things we know of that can cause Biometrics to become disabled for a 3rd party app like mSecure. First, you can disable the feature in mSecure's Settings, which isn't likely to be the cause of the problem your are reporting.

Next, OS updates have been known to disrupt Biometric functionality, and it's also possible the permission for an app to use these features gets removed somehow. Neither of these events are supposed to disable this functionality, but it does happen occasionally.

The third action we know will disable Biometric unlock is if you change the fingerprint data in Android's Settings. This, however, is an intentional security feature. Whenever the user's biometric information is altered in this manner, the authentication data in the device's secure storage is reset which causes the biometric unlock feature to be disabled for mSecure. The reason for this feature is to keep thieves from bypassing the security of your installed apps. If this feature didn't exist, then anyone could get hold of your device, add a new fingerprint in the device's settings, then they would be able to open and unlock mSecure and any other app you gave permission to unlock via biometric authentication.

The fourth thing that might cause this to happen is permissions being lost for the app to use the biometric features on the device. Unfortunately, I have not been able to confirm this happening in Android OS, but we have had a couple of customers mention something that sounded like there may be permissions for 3rd party apps on their device. If the permission for using the fingerprint scanner on your device was removed in Android OS, that would cause the feature to stop working inSecure. If this happened, then giving mSecure permission again should make it possible to use the feature to unlock the app. Again though, I'm not entirely sure this is possible for Android devices.

The first thing I need to do is confirm whether or not you see the fingerprint icon on the lock screen for mSecure. When you open the app to the screen asking for your password, do you see a blue icon near the bottom of the screen? If you do, what happens when you tap on that icon?

Hi Daniel,

I'm really sorry to hear about what's happened here. Due to the security build into the app, there's no way to get around the lock screen when trying to access data stored in the app. The password has to be accepted in order for the data stored in the app to be decrypted, so if mSecure can't decrypt the data it has, it simply won't unlock. Unfortunately, since we don't get access to your account password, there's just no way for me to help you get access to your data. I'm really sorry I don't have better news here.

Hi Daniel,

Unfortunately, I don't believe that what you are asking for is possible. If the fingerprint information needed to unlock the mSecure app, which is stored by the Android OS on the device, was still available, the feature would not have been disabled to begin with. I'll talk to our developer about this to see if it's somehow possible the security information still exists, but it's not likely. I'll get back to you after I hear from the developer.

I understand exactly what's happening here Daniel. The problem is, there are all sorts of things that can happen behind the scenes that causes issues with settings in apps. For the biometric unlock feature, the behavior when things go wrong is very difficult to weed out because mSecure is not in control of the feature. The app is simply tying into a feature fully controlled by the OS. So when you turn on barometric unlock, data is stored in a secure location on your device that's managed by the OS. When you open your device and your prompted to use the biometric unlock feature, mSecure is simply asking Android OS to authenticate the user, and if they are authenticated, then the OS will return password so the mSecure can use it to decrypt the information in the app and unlock it. In this case, it's not clear what is causing the feature to be disabled. It could be that mSecure just thinks the feature is disabled but the security information is still stored with the OS, but we have never seen that happen before. The most likely case is that the data stored with the OS has been lost somehow, like maybe during an auto-update, and now mSecure is finding out from the OS that the feature can't be used. In the end, it's very complicated to figure out the problem.

After talking to our developer, he recommended installing the latest beta of the 6.1 release that will be published soon. Are you open to install that build of the app to see if it can fix the problem?

Hi Daniel,

Since I'll be sending you links to beta versions of mSecure, I'm moving our correspondence to email instead of the forum. I just sent you an email a few minutes ago, so go ahead and respond to it after you get a chance to read it and install the beta version for Android.

@Christophe It's possible the beta version of mSecure 6.1 will fix it for you, but it's not certain. The issue 6.1 fixes is a bug that causes mSecure to require a password when it shouldn't, after about a 3 year period, I think. However, it's possible the device simply disabled fingerprint recognition for mSecure, and in that case, 6.1 will not fix the problem.

If you would like to try 6.1, please send an email to [email protected]. After you send the email, let me know here in the forum, and I'll respond as soon as I see it.

Thank you again Christophe! I have your work-around recorded and will use it to help others in the future. Take care, and please let me know if you need further assistance.