“As I’ve mentioned in the previous tutorials, with the development of cryptanalysis and new hacking techniques, the cost of accessing your data without your authorization continues to decline, making it easier and more attractive for different sides to get it.
I’m not going to get into details about the motivation of each side and the goals they’re trying to achieve by obtaining your data. Instead, I would like to focus on the solution to that problem.
In my opinion, the only way to keep your data private is to raise the costs of unauthorized access to it as high as possible, ideally higher than any reward that a third side can get by obtaining your data. Doing so puts away the incentives to access your data without your permission.
To raise the cost of unauthorized access to your data - I’ve developed Midbar (which later on “evolved” into a multi-user Cipherbox, and then it kinda turned back into Midbar because I realized that a “multi-user Midbar” is superfluous and not as stable as a single-user one).
After ending the Cipherbox project and making several versions of Midbar, I realized that although making a “multi-user Midbar” wasn’t a good idea, making “a vault that requires the RFID cards to be unlocked” was rather a good idea than a bad one. So, I made a decision to combine what I consider to be the best aspects of Midbar and Cipherbox in the Midbar V4.0 by making a “single-user Midbar that requires four RFID cards to be unlocked.” And after that, I decided that I also would like to make a “single-user Midbar that requires four RFID cards to be unlocked that can easily encrypt and decrypt a 10 000 character-long string.” So, as you might’ve already guessed, the Midbar (Raspberry Pi Pico Version) V2.0 is the Raspberry Pi Pico version of the Midbar V4.0.
In case you want to know why I called this project Midbar - Midbar (מדבר) is a Hebrew word that means “pasture,” “uninhabited land,” “wilderness,” “large tracts of wilderness (around cities),” “desert.” I had two reasons for choosing the word Midbar as the name of this project. First - while working on my previous projects, I noticed that the so-called “device that keeps your personal data secure in an encrypted form” market is pretty much a “desert around the oasis of the password manager market.” Second - I couldn’t find a better word to describe that project. At first, I wanted to call it a “Password Vault,” but then I realized that it’s more than just a password vault. So, I just called it Midbar!
Supplies:
- Raspberry Pi Pico x1
- 2.4 Inch TFT LCD with ILI9341 x1
- EC11 Rotary Encoder x1
- PS/2 Keyboard x1
- PS/2 Port x1
- 4.7k resistors x7
- 100nf capacitors x2
- Buttons x2
- Mifare RC522 RFID Reader x1
- RFID cards x4”