As hackers get more brazen, it’s becoming a huge hassle to change our passwords due to the multitude of services we keep signing up for. Thankfully, there are password managers like KeePass and LastPass (among a lot of others) to help ease the pain and annoyance of dealing with security over multiple sites and services, but it’s not the definitive answer to the problem. Google’s going to take a stab at that problem with Project Vault, a secure device that plugs into any desktop or mobile device that supports microSD. This device runs its own ultra-secure operating system partitioned from the rest of the host device’s storage with 4GB of storage for your most sensitive data.
The Project Vault system runs a custom-built Real Time Operating System (RTOS) with a number of cryptographic solutions that keep data secure and messaging with your contacts that also have Vault. Vault aims to be as user friendly as possible, having the host do all the work without users having to configure the device. Google also showed off a security protocol that determines who you are based on your habits, and takes that input to create a “Trust Score,” referencing how certain it is that YOU ARE the owner of a device. Project Vault and RTOS system are still “very much in the experimental stage” roughly 500 people internally at Google testing it, however the source code for the system is available in the link below so developers can start familiarizing themselves with it.
The PractitioNERD 