Wireless door alarms protect your stuff from afar

April 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

wireless-shed-alarm

[Webby] had a friend named [Steve], and as the story goes [Steve] had a few storage sheds on his property that were prone to break-ins.

While the doors were all fitted with a lock, wooden doors are only so strong, and are easy fodder for intruders bearing crowbars and the like. [Steve] was looking for a good way to know when people were poking their heads where they don’t belong, so he rigged up a set of simple alarms that let him know when it’s time to break out the shotgun.

On each of the shed doors, he installed a small IR proximity sensor wired up to a PIC12F675 microcontroller. The PIC is is connected to the “call” button a medium range wireless radio, so that whenever the IR sensor detects that the door is ajar, the PIC triggers an alert on the base unit.

The solution is simple, which we figure also makes it pretty reliable – nice job!

Filed Under: home hacks, news, security hacks Tagged With: , , , ,

Apartment entry morse-code lock

April 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Bozar88] lives in an apartment building that has a buzzer at the front security door. Guests find your name on the panel next to that door, and press a button to ring the phone just inside the entry of each apartment unit. He decided to extend the built-in capabilities by adding a morse-code entry password which unlocks the security entrance automatically (translated).

He designed a circuit and etched his own board which fits nicely inside of the wall-mounted phone. It uses an ATtiny2313 to implement the coding functions. The device attaches to the intercom line in order to detect incoming button presses from the entry panel. There’s some protection here to keep the signal at or below 5V. The output is two-fold. The microcontroller can drive the microphone line using a transistor, which gives the user audio feedback when the code is entered. To unlock the door an opt-isolated triac (all in one package) makes the connection to actuate the electronic strike on the entry door.

The video after the break is not in English, but it’s still quite easy to understand what is being demonstrated.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: home hacks, Microcontrollers, security hacks Tagged With: , , ,

Tales from the Hackaday "tip line"

April 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

surprisingly accurate portrayal of Caleb

Lets just start right off and acknowledge that the word “Hack” is in our site name. We all see it. It is right there, in plain English. However, anyone who spends more than a few nanoseconds looking down below that big name, will quickly see that the kind of hacking we do is more like McGyver and less like Operation Swordfish.

This exceedingly obvious point is missed by many, many people. We get tons of requests coming in for various acts of hackery. They range from nonsense gibberish to flagrant lies. Yeah, sure you forgot your password and the recovery system isn’t working. Oh they stole your website but you can’t prove that you’re the owner? Hrm, you want to be a master hacker and are seeking our guidance on how to steal money?

Join me after the break for a few actual examples.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: rants, security hacks Tagged With: , , , ,

Open source tracking system gets a Kickstarter

April 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

open-source-tracker

Many of the hacks featured here inspire others to build on the creator’s work, and on occasion the positive feedback brings the hack to market. Last year we told you about [Wayne’s] creation, a system aimed at tracking down would-be game console thieves. He received a bunch of requests to document the tracker in full, so he decided to revise his creation and release it as Open Source Hardware.

As you might remember, his original tracking device was powered by an Arduino, which monitored an accelerometer and GPS sensor, reporting coordinates and movements to his mobile phone on demand. He combined the disparate components together on a single board, and started a Kickstarter for the project.

Aside from his original purpose of tracking stolen goods, he lists off an array of other uses, such as tracking the driving habits of your newly licensed teen, geofencing objects in certain areas and more.

If an SMS controlled all-in-one tracking system is something you might be interested in, check out his Kickstarter, or take a look at the documentation and build one of your own.

Filed Under: arduino hacks, security hacks Tagged With: , , ,

Brute force a password protected PDF using the BeagleBone

March 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The biggest benefit to using the BeagleBone is it’s 700 MHz ARM processor. If you’re just messing around with basic I/O that power is going unused, but [Nuno Alves] is taking advantage of its power. He built a PDF password cracker based on the $85 development board.

We recently saw how easy it is to perform basic I/O using the BeagleBone. Those techniques are in play here, used to drive a character LCD and sample a button input from the breadboard circuit. [Nuno] even published separate posts for each of these peripheral features.

The password protected PDF file is passed to the device on a thumb drive. Since the BeagleBone is running embedded Linux you don’t need to mess around with figuring out how to read from the device. A click of the button starts the process. Currently the code just uses a brute force attack which can test more than 6000 four-character passwords per second.  This is quite slow for any password more than four or five characters long, but [Nuno] does mention the possibility of running several ARM processors in parallel, or using a dictionary (or rainbow table) to speed things up. Either way it’s an interesting project to try on the hardware. You can see his video demo of the device after the break.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Microcontrollers, security hacks Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Dead HDD smartphone stand still holds secret data

March 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We’ve actually got a few dead hard drives collecting dust so when we hear about a project that finds a use for one we perk up a bit. But we were somewhat disappointed when we discovered this was a smartphone stand, pen holder, and LED lamp in one. We just don’t have a use for this kind of triple-tasker. But wait… the dead drive has a secret. It still serves as data storage, if you know how to enabling the drive within.

As you can seen, [Samimiy] removed all the guts of the HDD, repurposing the platters and mounting brackets as the phone holder, and mounting plate for a couple handfuls of LEDs. The lamp portion can be adjusted thanks to the articulated based from a small desk lamp he had in his parts bin. The device receives power from the USB connector you can see in the upper right. That’s where the first part of the secret comes in. This isn’t just supplying power, it provides a USB connection to the thumb drive hidden inside the HDD case. But just connecting it to your computer won’t mount it. [Samimy] took the light sensor from an automatic nightlight and set it up below the pen holder. If you shine a flashlight down the hole in that piece of wood it will routed power to the secret USB drive causing it to enumerate on your system. Pretty clever! Take a look at his build video after the break.

We wonder if there’s a way to incorporate this light-based lock system into that mouse-mounted thumb drive.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: security hacks Tagged With: , , , ,
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