Developed On Hackaday: Current Status And Selected Beta Testers

June 24, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 30 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 look at all the articles we previously published on Hackaday.

As you can see from our commit activity these last weeks have been extremely busy for us. We finally have a firmware that uses all the different libraries that our contributors made but also a chrome plugin and extension that can communicate with our Mooltipass. We’re very happy to say that our system is completely driverless. A video will be published on Hackaday next week showing our current prototype in action as some of the contributors are already using it to store their credentials.

We selected 20 beta testers that will be in charge of providing us with valuable feedback during the final stages of firmware / plugin development. Selection was made based on how many passwords they currently have, which OS they were using but also if they were willing to contribute to the prototype production cost. We expect them to receive their prototypes in less than 2 months as the production funds were wired today.

We think we’ve come a long way since the project was announced last december on Hackaday, thanks to you dear readers. You provided us with valuable feedback and in some cases important github push requests. You’ve been there to make sure that we were designing something that could please most of the (non) tech-savy people out there and we thank you for it. So stay tuned as in a week we will be publishing a video of our first prototype in action!

Want to chat with us? You can join the official Mooltipass Google Group or follow us on Hackaday Projects.

Developed On Hackaday: We Have Final Prototypes!

June 5, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 47 Comments

The last few weeks have been quite tense for the Mooltipass team as we were impatiently waiting for our smart cards, cases and front panels to come back from production. Today we received a package from China, so we knew it was the hour of truth. Follow us after the break if you have a good internet connection and want to see more pictures of the final product…

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Developed On Hackaday: Vote For Your Favorite Card Art

April 21, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 33 Comments

A few weeks ago we asked our dear readers if they were interested in coming up with some card art for the Mooltipass project. We received more than a dozen of them and a few days ago the HaD project Mooltipass followers/Mooltipas Google group recipients voted for their favorite ones.

Today we’ll present you the three popular ones and ask you to pick your favorite, so please follow us after the break…

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Developed On Hackaday: 2 Days Left To Submit Your Design!

April 10, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 9 Comments

We’re sure that many of Hackaday readers already know that one of the two main components of the Mooltipass project is a smart card, containing (among others) the AES-256 encryption key. Two weeks ago we asked if you’d be interested coming up with a design that will be printed on the final card. As usual, many people were eager to contribute and recently sent us a few suggestions. If you missed the call and would like to join in, it’s not too late! You may still send your CMYK vector image at mathieu[at]hackaday[dot]com by sunday. More detailed specifications may be found here.

In a few days we’ll also publish on Hackaday a project update, as we recently received the top and bottom PCBs for Olivier’s design. The low level libraries will soon be finished and hopefully a few days later we’ll be able to ship a few devices to developers and beta testers. We’re also still looking for contributors that may be interested in helping us to develop browser plugins.

The Mooltipass team would also like to thank our dear readers that gave us a skull on Hackaday projects!

Developed On Hackaday: Need Card Art — Who Likes To Draw?

March 27, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 32 Comments

Our offline password keeper project (aka Mooltipass) is quite lucky to have very active (and very competent) contributors. [Harlequin-tech] recently finished our OLED screen low level graphics library which (among others) supports RLE decompression, variable-width fonts and multiple bit depths for fonts & bitmaps. To make things easy, he also published a nice python script to automatically generate c header files from bitmap pictures and another one to export fonts.

[Miguel] finished the AES encryption/decryption schemes (using AES in CTR mode) and wrote an awesome readme which explains how everything works and how someone may check his code using several standardized tests. We highly encourage readers to make sure that we didn’t make any mistake, as it was one of you that suggested we migrate to CTR mode (thanks [mate]!).

On the hardware side, we launched into production the top & bottom PCBs for Olivier’s design. We’re also currently looking for someone that has many Arduino shields to make sure that they can be connected to the Mooltipass. A few days ago we successfully put the Arduino bootloader inside our microcontroller and made the official Arduino Ethernet shield work with it.

Finally, as you may have guessed from the picture above our dear smart card re-sellers can pretty much print anything on them (these are samples). If one of you is motivated to draw something, please contact me at mathieu[at]hackaday.com!

On a (way) more childish note, don’t hesitate to give a skull to the mooltipass on HaD projects so it may reclaim its rightful spot as “most skulled“.

Chameleon Emulates Contactless Smart Cards

December 28, 2013 by Adam Fabio 46 Comments

chameleon

Researchers at Ruhr University of Bochum in Germany have been busy working with RFID and related devices for quite some time now. They call the fruit of their labors Chameleon, a versatile Contactless Smart Card Emulator. Contactless Smart Cards are RFID style devices that also contain a smart card style memory. These cards are often used for payment, replacing mag strip style credit cards. Philips MIFARE Classic cards are a common example of contactless smart cards. The Chameleon is set up to emulate any number of cards using the common 13.56MHz frequency band. Adding a new card is as simple as loading up a new CODEC and application to the firmware. Currently Chameleon can emulate MIFARE cards using the ISO14443A.

The Chameleon is completely open source, and can be built for around $25 USD. The heart of the system is an Atmel ATxmega192A3 microcontroller. The 192 is a great microcontroller for this task because it contains hardware accelerators for both DES and AES-128. An FTDI USB interface chip is used to provide an optional communication link between a host computer and the ATxmega. The link can be used for debugging, as well as manipulating data in real-time. A host PC is not necessary for use though – the Chameleon will operate just fine as a stand alone unit. We definitely like this project – though we’re going to be doubling down on the shielding in our RF blocking wallets.

Developed On Hackaday: Let’s Build Some Hardware!

December 6, 2013 by Mathieu Stephan 142 Comments

We’re pretty sure that most of you already know that a few months ago Hackaday was bought by SupplyFrame, who therefore became our new evil overlords. We do hope you’ve noticed that they’re actually quite nice, and in their divine goodness they recently gave the go-ahead on this series called Developed on Hackaday.

A new project will be made by the Hackaday staff & community and will hopefully be brought to the consumer market. For those who don’t have the time/experience to get involved in this adventure, we want to show and document what it takes to bring an idea to the marketable product stage. For the others, we would like to involve you in the design/development process as much as possible. Obviously, this project will be open source hardware/software. This time around, the hardware will mainly be developed by yours truly. You may already know me from the whistled platform (currently sold on Tindie) or from all the different projects described on my website, which makes this new adventure far from being my first rodeo.

What’s in it for the contributors? During all the steps of this project, we’ll offer many rewards as well as hand-soldered first prototypes of the device so you can start playing/testing it. Nothing is set in stone so every suggestion is welcome. Should we make a Kickstarter-like campaign to manufacture the final product, we’ll only do so once our prototype is final, our partners are chosen and all details of the production process are set and confirmed. In that case, we will just need to gather the required funds to make the device a reality. What are we going to build? Keep reading to find out.

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