I want to have an NFC sticker on my laptop/desktop which when swiped with my NFC phone will unlock my computer. If I don't have my phone with me, I can still login using my normal password. I so far bought some NFC stickers and installed TagStand on my phone which manages to post to a server that I control. I want to write some small piece of software that would listen to this server and unlock my computer if the server tells my computer to do so. I have not made the last part work as I don't know how to write such a software for either Mac or PC. Is it possible? If so, how?
The NFC part is very simple but the unlocking part is more complicated than you think. Unlocking your computer should never be done programmatically because if your program can do it, then so can others. Not to mention that this 'program' is going to act based on communication between a remote server and itself. This is a security nightmare, that has no use other than the experimental benefit.
If you do enough research you'll find that locking (not unlocking) a computer is possible programmatically. Unlocking on the other hand is not easy..
Here are a few links for you, I've been though them before, never tested them though...
Remotely-Unlock-a-Windows-Workstation
unlock-local-computer-using-net
unlock-windows-workstation-programatically
aucun
I thing another way of accomplishing this would be to do it the other way around. Have your phone store your password in an app that could pass it along to the computer. The computer would need some sort of USB NFC reader that would essentially act as a keyboard. When you tap your phone to the USB device it "types" your password into the text box and the last thing the app does is "hit the enter key" Obvious security issue is if you are running the unlocker app it is essentially just constantly sending out your password...
I would like to note that Asus has launched a product that does this (allows NFC login) for windows 8, so it is possible - as far as how secure it is I don't know...
Related
I'm trying to understand if (and if so, how) it's possible to dedicate a HID (USB-card reader for NFC cards) to a specific application in macOS.
The card reader acts as a keyboard, sending the number of the card to whatever is open in macOS. I'm trying to get that USB-device locked to a specific application (e.g. firefox, chrome etc).
I really have no idea where to start looking for this. Hence I'm posting here for any help in the right direction.
Googling "Dedicate USB device to app" etc gave nothing useful.
macOS version 10.14.5 (18F132) (Mojave).
The way applications communicate to USB devices is IOKit framework. You could write it as service if you want to lock applications anywhere. And you need to know about launchd (Launch Daemon). It manages all your background service.
I'm looking into NFC for use with Android phones and the newest iPhones. What I'm envisioning is some kind of NFC "broadcast" device plugged in via USB cable to a computer, so that it always sends out the most up-to-date information to whatever NFC-enabled phone is within close proximity. So far I've been seeing a whole lot of NFC "tags," which I assume are rather stupid devices that are pre-programmed with essentially static content. I'm wondering if there are any USB NFC devices on the market that can be more dynamic. Do such products exist? What's the best search keyword to find such a device? (What I've been searching for thusfar hasn't been turning up a whole lot of results.)
"NFC "broadcast" device plugged in via USB cable to a computer, so that it always sends out the most up-to-date information to whatever NFC-enabled phone is within close proximity" is your requirement. As I see in market there are NFC Readers with USB plugin to computer. They are active NFC devices generating 13.56MHz and mostly used for payment purposes. However they are putting these devices to ticketing, Office ID applications. When you bring your NFC Phone within this reader's proximity, the reader will read your phone's data and shall send it to the computer as encrypted data and will be verified in your Computer. In this process, phone acts as passive device while reader is active device.
You can also control this reader using your corresponding Software in computer which you wish as dynamic writing.
I think this might help you http://www.acs.com.hk/en/products/3/acr122u-usb-nfc-reader/
I received a direct marketing USB stick on the mail the other day. As soon as I inserted it into my test-Mac - it opened Safari and wrote in the address of a website it wanted to visit. It had the exact same behaviour on my test PC.
Now, I was under the assumption that OSX didn't have an autorun feature. I'm running 10.10.3 and I can't even find the device under disk utility.
Any ideas on how they are doing this? The only thing I can think of is that it's piggybacking on a helper service, but I've never used any products from this company before.
How can I investigate the contents of the USB if I can't find it on my mac?
I can't even find the device under disk utility.
That is beacause it is not a disk device, but a USB HID "keyboard". The stick sends the key codes that will open the website automatically.
Is there any way Not to detect USB from windows PC?
The USB device should not mount on windows PC ,It should be handled by my application..
Suggestions please...
As far as I know there is no way of stopping the mount on the windows PC, however, you could set it up to autorun so that when it is plugged it in attempts to launch your application. This answer has some information on how to do this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/255067
There is also the option to hide a drive in windows by removing is drive letter (http://www.howtogeek.com/97203/how-to-hide-a-drive-in-windows-so-that-no-one-will-know-its-there/) however, this is almost certainly going to stop your application from reading it too.
If this is for a specific security reason then perhaps you could look at encrypting the drive and allowing only the application to decrypt the data. Thus, whilst mounted in windows it will be of little use.
Sorry I couldn't be of much more help.
Microsoft provides a utility called devcon for free download.
It's a "Command Line Uility Alternative to Device Manager".
It can actually do many things that I won't get into here, but removing a plug & play device is a simple operation once you know the unique name of the device you want to manipulate.
Refer this to check how to work with it.
It sounds like you don't want your device to show up as a drive in My Computer. In that case, why are you using the Mass Storage Device class at all? You could make a custom, vendor-specific device and talk to it using control/interrupt/bulk transfers with WinUSB. You would need to change the Device's USB descriptors to indicate it is a vendor-specific device and not a mass-storage device.
Whenever I disconnect my Windows Phone from PC (connected through USB) and if my application is running, my application hangs for sometime and then application crashes.
Does anyone experienced same behavior? I guess switching for PC connection to Wi-Fi/GPRS is causing the issue.
the windows Phone Requires that you Safely Remove hardware first, after a few times when i started Development on the windows phone i did the same and Ended up getting a new Phone. So plainly put, try to Safely Remove and Make sure it is installing the app to the Device.
Meaning if you Remove the phone, the App is still able to be ran just like a normal downloaded App form the Market place.
if you want more in depth information, i would suggest Reading the WP7 Everything Programming ebook lol
its filled with good information, and Definitely Helped me along my road to Love DEV for WP7.
As gamernb says, if you disconnect the USB from a properly tethered Windows Phone (i.e. connected to Zune, or using the WPConnect utility), the phone's network connection will be reset and your app's connections will be terminated. The phone will then start trying to connect using WiFi or cellular data (if they are on), but this can take quite a while.
You will have to handle this network disconnection in your app - I've found that pulling the USB cable in this way is a good ad-hoc test for WP7 apps: do an action which you know will use the network connection. Then watch if the app crashes, or handles this gracefully.
Actually you aren't guaranteed to always use the PC data connection: if you make sure that the computer has no data connection (i.e. pull the Ethernet cable, turn off WiFi etc ), the WP7 app can then use cellular data or WiFi on the phone instead.
Alas-
you could set perimeters in your application to Check what the connection type is, then Make changes accordingly.
You May have a slight freeze, but that's better then a crash....mainly when the phone switches from PC to WWAN, their would be a slight Pause.
use the Reachability Class and NSLog to Figure out whats going on exactly.
I really hope that helps!