It’s been a long time since I released the first version of Secure Virtual Keyboard, v0.01. And it’s quite funny reading myself

I’ve been following all the comments made by visitors and users, and I’m working on the known issues as well as improving my proposal of a secure virtual keyboard. I don’t want to make any announcement about when I’ll release, but I promise it will be before August. I cannot make any promise because I’m writing my thesis and I must have it finished by June, so there’s little time for this tiny project of mine (I know… I have had plenty of time, but you know… it’s called lazyness).

I have yet to decide wether to use this blog for the next release or Google Code, I guess I’ll end up using Google Code because they can provide a version control system as well as some other nice features

Anyway… you’ll soon see the results of my little project so you can contribute if you like. In the mean time… I fixed the sample page which was broken (I guess I broke it myself when I did a major software update)

I finally got it, after a few days of debugging and testing I finally have the first release of a nice and open source virtual keyboard programmed in JavaScript for your webapps wich randomly moves inside a container for each keystroke.

Get the first (and beta) release of SVK v0.01 (Secure Virtual Keyboard). Decompress the files, and load kb.htm in your favourite web browser (right now, only supporting IE6 and FF1.5, but more browsers are coming…). One more thing… I’m Spanish as well as the keyboard image; but using any other keyboard shouldn’t be too hard (next release will include a much better documentation).

I first saw a nice keyboard like this in the Grupo Santander Supernet’s login system. The truth is that this is an open source implementation of their work. I have used some of their images, so until I got an answer from them about the license of the used images I have to warn you not to use them for any commercial purpose, just academic purpose.

My implementation uses the Prototype framework, but I will release a Prototype-free version in a few days (two weeks or so). I also use CSS to load and apply some filters to the images instead of loading all diferent images with JavaScript (check their application and check mine). We both use the map HTML tag to map the different keys of the keyboard, although I don’t really use the image of the img HTML tag; I have a transparent image where I use the map, but this image is inside a div which has the real keyboard image as a background (and this is where I apply the random movement as well as the opacity filter).

Because of my obsession with object-oriented development, I have found some issues with IE (what a surprise.. eh?): creating areas for the map with the DOM core function createElement() worked but IE didn’t do nothing when clicking; so I finally used the innerHTML property (check the _createMap method, non-working code is included but commented).

There’s still a lot of work to do, check the README file, but I think my approach is a good start to get a nice virtual keyboard and also secure. I encourage you to read the LICENSE terms (GNU/GPL v2) and remember what I said about the images (it would be nice if someone did a Creative Commons keyboard)

Happy downloading, and feedback (bugs, request features, fixes for known issues,…) is welcome.

Update [30-09-2006]: Check the demo page (Remember… only IE6 and FF1.5 are officially supported…)

Update [24-04-2008]: I’m working on a new version! And… demo page fixed (sorry for taking so long)