Picoth Is a Raspberry Pi Pico-Based 2FA Gadget
Angainor's two-factor authentication hardware uses the new Raspberry Pi board alongside a Pimoroni RGB Keypad and Display Pack.
We believe that having a strong password is more than enough to keep your account and data safe. However, with the rise in cyber crimes, two-factor authentication has become essential. As the name suggests, 2FA has two layers of verification other than the password alone. Angainor has designed a MicroPython implementation of user-friendly, Raspberry Pi Pico-based hardware to handle many 2FA keys, reducing the pain of finding the right pin on the Google authenticator.
Apart from the Pico board, Angainor's setup consists of Pimoroni's Pico RGB Keypad Base and Pico Display Pack, as well as a DS3231 Arduino module. For hardware wiring, refer to the project logs on Hackaday.
As the official MicroPython does not support Pimoroni C libraries for Pico add-ons. Also, the support for user C modules is broken and the fork does not have SHA256. "I ended up handling yet another fork, based upon the official MicroPython with user C modules re-enabled, SHA256 and Pimoroni libs," Angainor notes.
With an excellent performance by the Pico, the challenge was to figure out the configuration of the keypad base and Pico display with the same Raspberry Pi Pico. Thanks to the use of reference documents for RP2040, it was possible to connect the Pico add-ons with some tweaks.
The project can display the correct two-factor authentication TOTP code from a key with DS3231 RTC as a clock source. To continue modifying, we can expect some software upgrades in the coming days.
More details on the project are available on Angainor's page.