Alpine™ Secure Computing Corporation
Alpine is the newest addition to Secure Computing's highly successful line of one-time-password tokens. After selling my previous designs for over five years, Secure Computing retained me once more to design their newest offering. The main design criteria -- smaller, cheaper, and more versatile.
Alpine presented all of the engineering challenges of Secure's legacy tokens, plus several new ones. As the market for tokens has broadened, Secure needed a smaller product with good consumer appeal. I contacted a former toy designer I knew, and sub-contracted him to generate eight concept drawings. Secure chose the "carabiner" design. I then introduced Secure to a mechanical engineer with whom I had worked previously, and he was retained to work with me on the full development of Alpine.
The small size of Alpine meant that its battery had to be small as well. Thus, I needed a processor with very low power consumption, as well as a very low price. Through my contacts in China, I found a very simple Chinese manufactured MCU which is not generally marketed in the US. Costing only a few dimes, its simplicity endowed it with very low power consumption, but also presented me with the challenge of having limited resources. Because the MCU implements standard OATH authentication algorithms, I needed to write routines to implement HMAC-SHA1, including the hash message authentication code, and the SHA1 hash function. The firmware, which I wrote completely in assembly language, is optimized for both processor speed and memory efficiency. Passwords are generated almost instantaneously, and battery life is guaranteed to be at least three years.
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