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: Mooltipass Arduino Shields Compatibility

September 16, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 15 Comments

Some of our dear readers may already have an infallible system to remember different complex passwords for the different websites they visit daily. This is why they may have not been following the offline password keeper that the Hackaday community is building.

The Mooltipass has a characteristic that may regain their interest: it is possible to connect Arduino shields to it. In the video embedded below you can see the Arduino conversion process our development team imagined a few months back. The operation simply consists in using a knife to remove plastic bits on top of standard Arduino headers. We also embedded a few use cases with their respective sketches that may be downloaded from our official GitHub repository.

As with stacking several shields, a little tweaking may be required to keep the functionalities from both the Mooltipass and the connected shield. We therefore strongly welcome Arduino enthusiasts to let us know what they think of our setup.

In the meantime, you may want to subscribe to our official Google Group to stay informed of the Mooltipass launch date.

Continue reading “Developed On Hackaday: Mooltipass Arduino Shields Compatibility” →

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.

Developed On Hackaday: Beta Testers, Animation And Assembly Videos

July 30, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 53 Comments

We’re pretty sure that most of our readers already know it by now, but we’ll tell you anyway: the Hackaday community (writers and readers) is currently developing an offline password keeper, the Mooltipass. A month ago we published our first demonstration video and since then the development team has been fairly busy at work.

First things first: we heard (well, read) the comments you left in our previous articles and decided to make a small animation video that will hopefully explain why having an offline password keeper is a good thing. We welcome you to have a look at our script draft and let us know what you think. We updated our GitHub readme and more importantly our FAQs, so feel free to tell us if there are still some questions you have that we didn’t answer. We finally found a short but yet interesting paper about software based password keepers possible security flaws.

Secondly, a little more than 20 prototypes have successfully been assembled and some beta testers actually already received them. As they financially contributed to their units we offered them the possibility to pick a blue, green, yellow or white OLED screen (see picture above). We therefore expect things to gain speed as we’ll have users (or rather bosses) pushing us to improve our current platform and implement much needed features.

Finally, as I figured some of our readers may be interested, I made a quick video of the prototype assembly process (embedded below). It is still a little sketchy and a few changes will be made to make it simpler for production. We expect these next weeks to be full of interesting events as our beta testers / Hackaday readers will be able to judge the work we’ve been doing for so long. We highly recommend you to subscribe to our official Google group to stay updated with our adventures.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTOw-sVSXzQ

USBPass – A Mooltipass-like Project

January 1, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 15 Comments

In our Developed on Hackaday series some readers may recall a sentence we wrote: “if one’s idea is not yet in the market, it’s either completely stupid or people are already working on it”. Well, [Josh] casually mentioned that he was also working on an offline password keeper after having recently subscribed to our google group. Similarly to the Hackaday-developed platform, the USBPass is connected to a computer via USB and is detected as an HID keyboard. As you can see in the picture shown above, it uses very few components: an ATMega32U2, a USB connector, three buttons and a few passives chips.

A total of 20 passwords can be stored in the microcontroller’s memory, which can be ‘typed’ by the platform using the push buttons. The USBPass firmware is based around the LUFA USB stack, to which [Josh] added HID report functionality to allow data transfer from his desktop application. The latter uses the Linux/Windows/OS X HID API library so bringing his software to other operating systems can be done in no time. All the project resources can be found on GitHub, while [Josh] is currently working on a B revision which will include an OLED screen.