norrist uses

a raspberry pi pico to type passwords

Password Managers

I like using a password managers

Every site has a different complex password

I use the browser plugin or copy paste.

I recently switched from last pass to bit warden.

I was one of the users that did not get prompted to increase the

number of password iterations from 1000.

They work basically the same.

My stupid bank

The normal procedure for changing passwords is

fill in old password

generate new random password

copy paste new password into the new password field

For some reason, my bank's site uses JavaScript to block paste into

the new password fields

I don't know why banks or anyone disable pasting into a browser

field

The only way I could change my password, was to generate a password

simple enough that it could be manually typed into the change

fields

First solution

I wanted to find something like a programmable keyboard where you

could input an input string and have the device type out the

characters

I found a few keyboards that used macros, but they seemed too simple

to use for a complex password.

I saw somewhere online that you could use a micro-controller to

emulate a keyboard.

I had a circuit playground express that I wasn't using for

anything.

The circuit playground express has 2 built in buttons

I found a circuit python tutorial for emulating keystrokes and

modified it so it would emulate the keystrokes for a password.

Button A would output a password and button B would output a

different password.

Problems

The passwords were stored as variables in the code

The circuit playground express has a lot of built in LED's and touch

pads. It was really being wasted to only use it as a keyboard emulation

device

I have another project I want to use the playground express for

Next Solution

Raspberry Pi Pico - $4 micro controller

I was able to get circuit python to micro controller a keyboard on

the pi pico

Not many ways to get physically interact with board.

No buttons and only one LED.

I decided the best way was to have a count down timer

blink the led to indicate where the timer was in the countdown

output the keystrokes when the countdown timer reached zero

More problems

Circuit python devices work by exposing a small file system when

plugged in via USB.

You can mount the file system and edit the code running on the micro

controller

Once the device is powered on, it starts emulating keystrokes every

time the countdown timer cycles

to keep the micro controller keystrokes from interfering with any

work you were doing I would have to mount the device and quickly comment

out part of the code so it would stop sending keystrokes

As a fix, I added a check to only send keystrokes if a file named

send_keys exists

Now, I can work on the code and only add the send_keys

file when I an ready.

Storing the password

I didn't like that the password I want to send as keystrokes was

stored as a variable in the code.

I modified that python to read the password from a separate file

named pw.txt

Setup the Pi Pico

Install circuit python

https://learn.adafruit.com/get