Passy-pass, a USB password storage device

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By John Baichtal
Posted 2010/09/28 @ 6:45 am
Category Computers & Mobile

Minneapolis hacker sigFLUP designed this cool box for managing her passwords.

This automatically stores generated and types all my usernames and passwords. It’s a pretty simple system. It’s a bitsy at89s5131 atmel 8051-ish microcontroller. This is a usb microcontroller and I’ve programmed it to look like a standard usb-keyboard.

<...> it has eeprom to store our passwords. The random number generator is seeded by delays between keypresses so I would imagine it’s fairly hard to predict.

You can download the schematic (.pdf) but sigFLUP didn’t provide the source code. Maybe if we asked nicely? [Via Hack-a-Day]

BY John Baichtal

My interests include writing, electronics, RPGs, comics, scifi, hackers & hackerspaces, 3D printing, building sets, & toys.

In the Maker Shed

Getting Started with Raspberry Pi

BeagleBoard BeagleBone Black

Telegraph Decoder Kit by Spikenzie Labs

Getting Started with Arduino Kit v3.0

2 Responses to Passy-pass, a USB password storage device

thundt.myopenid.com on September 28th, 2010 at 9:11 am said:

Nice. Maybe eventually you can add some kind of biometric id capability instead of the passphrase, if you feel like going wild with it. How do you get the existing passwords into the device? (By typing them on another USB keyboard?) Since you are generating passwords on the device, you’re going to have to deal with annoyingly-varying password requirements — you might end up with a menu of different formats. You can probably get it to pop up an editor automagically by sending R notepad . Lastly I bet you already have plans to add a Tab key to the device for moving from Username to Password Thanks for sharing your project.

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RocketGuy on September 28th, 2010 at 12:28 pm said:

Just watched the ask an engineer session where they debuted the new Arduino board, and since the new usb chip is programmable, it could be configured as a usb keyboard(or other hid device).

So of course I thought of doing a project like this for passwords. Combined with screen scraping all sorts of interesting ideas come to mind. Some of them are even legal!

-RG

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