|
|
|
|
|
DESIGN IDEAS - CMOS IC Makes Low-Cost Digital Potentiometer - Power Management In The ST62 - Automatic Power-Off Circuit Saves Battery - Simple PC Smart Card Reader Enhancement - Digital Position Encoder Does Away With ADC - Single-Supply RS-232 Transmission Without Level-Translator ICs - µC Controls Charge Pump As Background Task - Clock Multiplier Circumvents PLL - Drive Smart Cards With A Low-Cost MCU's UART - Wireless “Battery” Energizes Low-Power Devices - Harvest Energy Using A Piezoelectric Buzzer - Drive A Single-Coil Latching Relay Without An H-Bridge Circuit DESIGN CONTESTS ARTICLES
CONTACT
|
INTRODUCTION
In
today’s complex and ever changing world, the need for Internet security
has increased dramatically, due to a variety of fraudulent activities
related to password management, such as identity theft, phishing attacks
and so on. This is due to the fact that most people can only remember a
handful of passwords and therefore use the same combination of username
and password for all protected web access. This leads, however, to low
system security. To
prevent these situations occurring, it would be very useful to have an
external device attached to the PC through a convenient interface that can
securely store all the pair combinations of usernames and passwords and
retrieve them upon the user request. However, although several solutions
do currently exist, they are mostly software based and can be
counterfeited quite easily with the help of spyware or worms. In
order to increase the level of security, the weakest link in the security
chain (the human being) needs to be replaced with a more advanced and
secure tamper-resistant device, such as the smart card. This
application shows the design of such a password manager device, based on a
smart card using a powerful AVR-based microcontroller from Atmel. The
password manager device has an LCD display to browse through all stored
records and a numeric keypad to enter the Personal Identification Number
(PIN) and alphanumeric data to search for information and add new records.
The link to the computer is accomplished through a USB interface which,
thanks to the high performance of the AVR, makes it possible to emulate a
USB completely in software, without the need for any other external
dedicated integrated circuit. The confidential information is stored on a
Java Card smart card which is virtually impossible to crack. In addition,
the password manager device can be installed on the target computer
without the need for any driver installation. The
idea behind the password manager device is to emulate the keystrokes the
user would make when typing in a username and password. The easiest way
would be to use a PS/2 interface, but since this interface is only
available on legacy computers, it is much more convenient to use the USB
interface which is available on all modern computers – now and in the
future. The system is composed of three main blocks: · The hardware of ‘The Lord Of The Keys’ device based on the Atmel AVR ATmega168 · The firmware of ‘The Lord Of The Keys’ device ·
The software
of the applet running on the Java Card smart card
|
|
|
|
