Encrypted USB Drive File Providing Access to a Password-Protected Webpage

[Jon_7]

I'm trying to just do something fun for the kids in my class. I want to give the top students a USB Drive as a prize that has a link to a whole bunch of fun learning tools. To make that special, I want to be sure the website can't be accessed by anyone not using the link on the USB drive. This does not have to be any high level encryption; just something that works on the surface and can't be easily figured out by a 6th grader.

I was thinking to 1) Make the webpage password-protected. 2) Make the URL complex. 3) Make the file on the USB unable to be copied without permission. 4) Somehow embed the password in the USB file???

ANY HELP WOULD BE GREAT. Thx a ton.

[rproffitt]

I'm going with no. There is no such thing. Do you need to get into why?

For example the URL is human readable and shows up in almost all browsers so you can't hide that. So that can be copied.
Any file that can be read from a drive for execution is automatically open for copying.

I could go on but I see you're a long time member and why dash your ideas like this?

-> If these are tools for learnings wouldn't a teacher supply them to all the children?

Example: Ol' Musky shares the patents for a lot of his car inventions. Why?

"If we're all in a ship together," Musk said, "and the ship has some holes in it, and we're sort of bailing water out of it, and we have a great design for a bucket, then even if we're bailing out way better than everyone else, we should probably still share the bucket design."

If these are great learning tools, share the wealth.

[John_191]

Just an idea, and not a complete one at that.

On the USB stick, install the chrome browser and also chromedriver, a program that automates the browser, so I'm assuming it could be used to enter a password in a form (which will show up as asterisks, of course).

Create a "password program" that pipes the password to chromedriver. The password is somewhat obfuscated by being in an exe, but it should also be encrypted (perhaps with a Vigenere if you want to give them a chance). You can do a few things to further obfuscate strings in a program. Your letters could be every primeth one. You could even store each character separately. That'll learn 'em!

Anyway, I don't know if that would work or not. But it would probably need to be started from a script to connect things together.

[Jon_7]

I found two sites that say they can turn a USB Drive into basically a physical key to access a computer or website by creating and maintaining passwords. Could this (or a concept close to it) work?

• SECURE USB UNLOCK KEY

• LAST PASS PASSWORD MANAGER

[rproffitt]

As to those, they seem to miss your goal of no copying and not revealing the site address.

[John_191]

As long as there is a password I don't see the problem with revealing the address.

I forgot to mention making the USB drive uncopyable. There are supposedly some schemes for doing that (google "copy protect usb drive"). I don't know how well they work if at all. I saw that USB Key idea and thought the same as you, that maybe that was a starting point. But I don't think it is.

Anyway, I feel my idea has a chance. The starter program could be the exe that's hiding the password. It could start chrome and chromedriver and feed in the password ... maybe. I know virtually nothing about chromedriver.

[Jon_7]

Can't I just put the entire webpage's code on the drive? Like the HTML, CSS, and JS in the same folder for them to click on? What are some potential drawbacks of that? Maybe I can even make it uncopyable? And really, I don't mind if they pass it on :-)

Here's the page I want to share: http://fiftyallstars.com/50/curriculum.html --- But I really don't want to give all the kids, parents, and potentially other programs the link.