I’d never use a computer from library, cybercafe, friend’s or relative’s house to check my emails or log in to any website that have to key in my password. I will never know if the computer that I am using has spyware or keylogger installed that can capture my password as it is often impossible to tell. I still remember that many years ago I have a friend who used to work in a cybercafe and he told me that he installed keyloggers on all computers which helped him captured so many passwords! It is very unethical and I believe there are people still doing that.
There are software and hardware based keyloggers and then there is screenshot capture. It is possible to fool all those spy activity but it’s very troublesome. Today I found a way that can safely and EASILY login from internet cafes despite keyloggers and spyware.
KYPS is a free reverse proxy server created by Andreas Pashalidis that enables us to log into our accounts from a public/shared computer, without disclosing our password to that computer. KYPS is very easy to use and does not require you to run any software on the public/shared computer. All we have to do is to obtain a list of one-time codes from the KYPS server, print these codes, and keep the printout safely in our wallet (alternatively we could save our codes on our mobile phone or PDA). We can then log into our account using our one-time codes instead of our password.
This solution sounds perfect but my greatest concern was do I have to save my password in KYPS so it’ll login for me? No, my password won’t be saved or recorded by KYPS but it is required exclusively for generating a PDF file with our codes. KYPS then deletes our password and our one-time codes as soon as our codes have been returned to us. Each one-time code on the list is nothing more than an encrypted version of our password, which can only be decrypted by the KYPS server. The security of this encryption is based on the one-time pad technique.
Here are the steps to get started:
1. Register with KYPS and it will generate a registerReply.pdf file with your one-time codes.
2. Go to KYPS login page, select the website and enter the username.
3. Enter the one time code by referring to the number on the one time code list.
Other than protecting our password, KYPS also acts as a reverse proxy. Let’s say if we login to Hotmail using KYPS. You’ll notice that the URL will not even show hotmail.com address, instead it shows KYPS url with scrambled random characters.
KYPS service is truly a gem and I find it hard to believe that it is free to use (donations are welcomed). Currently KYPS only supports logging in to Microsoft Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Google Mail, Web.de, GMX and MySpace. Let’s hope that this free service will continue to go on and support more websites in future.
[ Visit KYPS ]
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