Inspiration
A member of our team uses a yubikey during his co-op for authenticating work accounts. This was seemed to be a super convenient and secure way to store passwords and access them with just one touch. Another factor was having one secure place where we can store all our passwords without having to bother about remembering too much. We looked to our iPhone to explore what we could do with touch ID and so we began the development process.
What it does
Hash is an iPhone application that connects to your desktop device and web extensions in order to successfully authenticate several user accounts seamlessly using your fingerprint via touch ID. It is simple to use, secure and convenient when ever you need to access any of your accounts.
How I built it
We looked towards what would make this work and we realized that we needed to ensure that the communication between devices have to be as accurate and secure as possible. With low powered bluetooth we were able to pair the iPhone and desktop application in order to send information back and forth from the web extensions. The web extensions are anchorage of detecting what site is currently being used and what credentials need to be stored and all the vital pieces of information is synced with dropbox in order to have a secure means to transfer information. The iPhone application was needed to be able to process the information coming in and act accordingly in order to provide precise and accurate results that fulfilled the users needs.
Challenges I ran into
One of the biggest challenges was with the bluetooth connection. This was due to the out of date documentation that was available for bluetoothle connection process. This took a fair bit of time to figure out along with the learning curve of adjusting to the new programming language (Swift). On the web side we struggled through insufficient documentation and had to learn how extensions worked and built from the limited knowledge we had. This included how to retrieve the right pieces of information needed from the sites and communication with the desktop applications.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
The ability for the application to communicate fast with the desktop and web extensions is defiantly something that posed a challenge and it added greatly to the core functionality of hash. We are also proud that we can give people the convenience to use such a tool with such ease and flexibility.
What I learned
All that we have learned today was completely new material and we were proud of the ability to easily pick it up at that speed and then use that knowledge to create something cool. We were all new to web extensions and how they worked so that was cool getting into. Bluetooth was also something we had never worked with and it posed a challenge for us and we are more than happy we overcame that challenge.
What's next for Hash
we want to push the limits as to what we can do with touch ID and security. forms of payment, identification processes and several other uses cases. we want to try out as many things as possible to ensure that it is used and appreciated by many
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.