Hackaday Links: November 23, 2014

November 23, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 3 Comments

The 2015 Midwest RepRap Festival, a.k.a. the MRRF (pronounced murf) was just announced a few hours ago. It will be held in beautiful Goshen, Indiana. Yes, that’s in the middle of nowhere and you’ll learn to dodge Amish buggies when driving around Goshen, but surprisingly there were 1000 people when we attended last year. We’ll be there again.

A few activists in St. Petersburg flushed GPS trackers down the toilet. These trackers were equipped with radios that would send out their position, and surprise, surprise, they ended up in the ocean.

[Stacy] has been tinkering around with Unity2D and decided to make a DDR-style game. She needed a DDR mat, and force sensitive resistors are expensive. What did she end up using? Velostat, conductive thread, and alligator clips.

You know the Espruino, the little microcontroller board that’s basically JavaScript on a USB stick? Yeah, that’s cool. Now you can do remote access through a telnet server letting you write and debug code over the net.

The Open Source RC is a beautiful RC transmitter with buttons and switches everywhere, a real display, and force feedback sticks. It was a Hackaday Prize entry, and has had a few crowdfunding campaigns. Now its hit Indiegogo again.

Speaking of crowdfunding campaigns, The Mooltipass, the designed-on-Hackaday offline password keeper, only has a little less than two weeks until its crowdfunding campaign ends. [Mathieu] and the rest of the team are about two-thirds there, with a little more than half of the campaign already over.

Developed On Hackaday: $50k Reached In A Week!

November 10, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 38 Comments

Around 500 awesome people backed the Mooltipass offline password keeper crowdfunding campaign, raising a total of $50k in less than a week… which is nearly half our goal.

The development team and I would therefore like to thank our readers for their support. We were featured by several electronics websites, which definitely helped spreading the world of open source security devices. Many interesting discussions spawned in either our comments section or official Google Group. One new contributor even started looking into implementing TOTP on the Mooltipass.

Another hot topic was a possible smaller and more powerful Mooltipass v2, implementing other functionalities like U2F and encrypted file storage. You may therefore wonder why we didn’t start with it… the reason is simple: limited resources. Our project is made by (great) non-remunerated contributors who took a lot of their spare time to work on the Mooltipass v1. We therefore preferred working on something we’d be sure we could deliver rather than wasting $4M by making promises. We therefore hope that our crowdfunding campaign might allow an even bigger collaboration around a Mooltipass v2!

Developed On Hackaday: Crowd- Funding Campaign Start!

November 4, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 47 Comments

For a little less than a year open source enthusiasts from all over the globe got together to work on an open source offline password keeper. We narrated our progress here on Hackaday and always asked our readers’ opinion when critical decisions were to be made.

Today, the wait is finally over: the Mooltipass crowdfunding campaign finally arrived.

In some of our Developed on Hackaday series posts we noticed that it was tricky for us to convey the benefits of the device we were developing. The first 3 minutes of our video therefore explain good security practices and how the Mooltipass can help users with their credentials security. For our readers that may not have followed our adventure since its beginning, the campaign’s text will provide them with a simple (yet detailed) explanation of what the Mooltipass can do. Finally, our geeky readers will find at the end of our write-up a few links supporting our claims. We would have liked offering cheaper pledges but we unfortunately need to hire professional javascript developers to finish our app & extension.

Our Mooltipass Developed on Hackaday series therefore come to an end. We would like to thank you for your support and hope that you enjoyed seeing an idea materialize into a crowdfunding-ready product!

Developed On Hackaday: The Answer Is Below

October 30, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 17 Comments

In one month the Mooltipass offline password keeper project will be one year old.

We hope that our twice a month Developed on Hackaday series posts allowed our dear readers to see what are the steps involved in a device’s life, going from idea to prototype to crowdfunding-ready product. The Mooltipass is the fruit of a unique world-wide collaboration around open source, developed by and for security minded people who (for most of them) never saw each other. Relating our progress here enabled us to benefit from our readers’ feedback and make sure that we didn’t miss important wanted features. Contrary to other campaigns that we often debunk on Hackaday, we preferred to wait until we had a beta-tester approved device to move to the crowdfunding stage. Our geekiest readers will therefore find the launch date embedded in this post, other may want to subscribe to our official Google group to stay updated.

Developed On Hackaday: Sometimes, All You Need Is A Few Flags

October 1, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 26 Comments

The development of the Hackaday community offline password keeper has been going on for a little less than a year now. Since July our beta testers have been hard at work giving us constant suggestions about features they’d like to see implemented and improvements the development team could make. This led up to more than 1100 GitHub commits and ten thousand lines of code. As you can guess, our little 8bit microcontroller’s flash memory was starting to get filled pretty quickly.

One of our contributors, [Miguel], recently discovered one compilation and one linker flags that made us save around 3KB of Flash storage on our 26KB firmware with little added processing overhead. Hold on to your hats, this write-up is going to get technical…

Many coders from all around the globe work at the same time on the Mooltipass firmware. Depending on the functionality they want to implement, a dedicated folder is assigned for them to work in. Logically, the code they produce is split into many C functions depending on the required task. This adds up to many function calls that the GCC compiler usually makes using the CALL assembler instruction.

This particular 8-bit instruction uses a 22-bit long value containing the absolute address of the function to call. Hence, a total of 4 flash bytes are used per function call (without argument passing). However, the AVR instruction set also contains another way to call functions by using relative addressing. This instruction is RCALL and uses an 11-bit long value containing the offset between the current program counter and the function to call. This reduces a function call to 2 bytes and takes one less clock cycle. The -mrelax flag therefore made us save 1KB by having the linker switch CALL with RCALL instructions whenever possible.

Finally, the -mcall-prologues compiler flag freed 2KB of Flash storage. It creates master prologue/epilogue routines that are called at the start and end of program routines. To put things simply, it prepares the AVR stack and registers in a same manner before any function is executed. This will therefore waste a little execution time while saving a lot of code space.

More space saving techniques can be found by clicking this link. Want to stay tuned of the Mooltipass launch date? Subscribe to our official Google Group!

Developed On Hackaday: Chrome/Firefox Apps/Extensions Developers Needed

September 2, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 10 Comments

The Hackaday community is currently working on an offline password keeper, aka Mooltipass. The concept behind this product is to minimize the number of ways your passwords can be compromised, while generating and storing long and complex random passwords for the different websites you use daily. The Mooltipass is a standalone device connected through USB and is compatible with all major operating systems on PCs, Macs and Smartphones. More details on the encryption and technical details can be found on our github repository readme or by having a look at all the articles we previously published on Hackaday.

Our beta testers are now using their prototypes daily and their feedback allowed us to considerably improve the Mooltipass. The firmware development is coming to an end as most functionalities have been implemented in the last few weeks. The development team is therefore turning his attention to the Chrome/Firefox plugins and needs your help to finish them in a timely manner. As you can guess, our goal is to provide a slick and intuitive interface for all of the Mooltipass features. If you have (a lot of) spare time, knowledge of the browsers APIs, feel free to leave a comment below with a valid email address!

Developed On Hackaday: Beta Testers And Automated Testing

August 19, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 17 Comments

At Hackaday we believe that your encrypted vault containing your credentials shouldn’t be on a device running several (untrusted) applications at the same time. This is why many contributors and beta testers from all over the globe are currently working on an offline password keeper, aka the Mooltipass.

Today we’re more than happy to report that all of our 20 beta testers started actively testing our device as they received the v0.1 hex file from the development team. Some of them had actually already started a few days before, as they didn’t mind compiling our source files located on our github repository and using our graphics generation tools. We are therefore expecting (hopefully not) many bug reports and ways to improve our device. To automatize website compatibility testing, our beta tester [Erik] even developed a java based tool that will automatically report non-working pages found inside a user generated list. You may head here to watch a demonstration video.