Episode: 3231
Title: HPR3231: USB Key
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3231/hpr3231.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 19:13:28

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This is Haka Public Radio episode 3231 for Monday the 21st of December 2020.
Today's show is entitled, USP key and in part of the series, Privacy and Security,
it is hosted by Toujet and in about two minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summer is, turn a thumb drive into a key to lock slash unlock your Linux machine.
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Hello Hacker Public Radio. This is Toujet again. Been a while since I did my last podcast,
so I thought I was more than overdue. If you like me, you probably have a few USP keys laying around
and came up with a little project I did with them just trying to experiment and learn some new
technology. I've actually turned a USB thumb drive into a USB key. It's a little script with
combo of a Pearl script installation. It uses SS key jam to generate keys for locking and unlocking.
It uses UDEV for actions for when you plug and unplug the drives. It uses bash for the actual
script for doing locking the unlocking and the key checking. It did run into a little problem with
UDEV. I had events set up so that when you plug in the drive, it would unlock and unplug the drive.
It would lock, but the problem I was running into is that when it was unlocking, I couldn't access
the file system on the drive. I found that there is a change event as well. Using the change event,
I'm able to actually have the plug-in of the drive unlock it, but then the change event,
which occurs when the drive is actually mounted, it can check the key and if the key is not the
right key, then it locks it again. It's short distance and it's unlocked, but that seems to work
pretty good. It generates a unique key combination for the server and the USB drive so you can use
the same drive on multiple computers or you can use multiple thumb drives on the same computer.
The website https.james.tobusacademy.com slash usbkey.html has the installation and links
for the script so you can download the scripts. Give it a quick try, let me know what you think and
have fun.
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