Tech Specs

The normie page is the homepage. This page is for the people who want to know exactly how Lomenett works.

What it is

Lomenett is an offline USB password manager, meaning a hardware password typer. It looks like a thumb drive, with an aluminum body, a small OLED screen, and a thumbwheel. It stores up to 1,000 logins encrypted on its own internal flash, and when you plug it in, it types your password for you. There is no app, no cloud, no browser extension, and no radio of any kind, so there is no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth, and nothing to intercept. The only way to talk to a Lomenett is to be holding it.

How it works: two modes

Lomenett has two modes, Inject and Edit, and it needs no software on your computer in either one. It uses only what the operating system already provides, whether that is Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, or iOS.

Inject mode: it's a keyboard

In Inject mode, Lomenett shows up to your computer as a plain USB keyboard. You scroll the thumbwheel to the login you want, put your cursor in the password field, and click the button. The device types the password as keystrokes, exactly like you would but faster and without typos, and the computer can't tell the difference between Lomenett and a keyboard, because as far as USB is concerned there is no difference. Per entry or globally, you can have it type the username, tab over, and then type the password, or show the username on the screen while typing only the password, or type only the password.

Nothing is copied to a clipboard and nothing is synced anywhere. The password goes from encrypted flash, through the device's RAM, and out the USB cable as keystrokes, and then it is wiped from RAM.

Edit mode: it's a flash drive (briefly)

In Edit mode, Lomenett spoofs a flash drive. You enter your PIN on the device, plug it in, and open it like any USB stick, and your logins are sitting there as a plain text file you can read and edit, one credential per line. You can add a line, fix a typo, or delete an old account, and you can drop in new entries at the end since the device sorts them alphabetically. Whatever you change sits in a RAM disk on the device and is not written to storage yet. When you hit save and eject, the device runs everything through encryption (a key derived from your PIN, then AES), writes the encrypted result to flash, and zeros out the RAM. The plaintext never touches permanent storage, so pulling the stick mid-edit loses your unsaved edits and nothing else.

That is the entire mechanism. Every computer already knows how to talk to a keyboard and a flash drive, so Lomenett never needs a driver, an app, or an account.

The lock: a secure element

Most PIN-protected gadgets can be attacked in private, as fast as a computer allows, because the thief copies the encrypted data off the device and works on the copy. A 4-digit PIN does not survive that, and we know because we did it to our own early prototype: we dumped the flash off a test unit and recovered the live PIN in about 17 seconds. That prototype never shipped, and it is the reason Lomenett has a dedicated secure element.

Lomenett uses an NXP SE050E secure element, a tamper-resistant security chip that is Common Criteria EAL6+ certified and belongs to the same class of part used in bank cards. It guards the real key under four rules:

• The key never comes out. The wrapping key that protects your vault is generated inside the SE050 and never leaves it. Desoldering the flash chip and reading it out gets you ciphertext and no key, so the attack that cracked our prototype returns nothing.
• The chip decides whether to unlock. Your PIN goes to the secure element, and it decides whether to release the key. It counts wrong attempts itself, in its own hardware, so the counter is not in flash, not in firmware, and not reset by pulling the battery.
• Too many wrong PINs and the key is destroyed permanently. After the attempt limit, the SE050 destroys the key and the vault becomes unreadable for everyone, forever. A thief gets a handful of guesses at the PIN and then the possibility is gone, which is what makes a short PIN safe here.
• It can't be cloned. The key is bound to that one physical chip. Copying the entire flash onto another board accomplishes nothing, because the other board's secure element doesn't have your key and can't be tricked into faking it.

The secure element is touched once per unlock, to hand the key back, and the main processor does the bulk encryption after that, so unlock, scroll, and type all stay fast.

The practical upshot is that losing your Lomenett is survivable. You restore from your encrypted backup onto a new one and move on, and the lost or stolen device is a dead end for whoever finds it.

Full specifications

What we don't claim

We're two guys in Minnesota rather than a marketing department, so here's the honest version.

Lomenett protects you against the common disasters, meaning a website's password database getting breached and your reused password showing up in a dump, cloud password manager vaults getting breached, phishing pages harvesting a synced vault, and plain old losing the device. Those are the big ones, and it handles them well, because there is no server to breach and no wireless signal to grab.

What it can't do is save you from a fully compromised computer. If the machine you plug into has a keylogger on it, that keylogger records what Lomenett types the same way it records what your fingers type, and no hardware password manager can fix that, because the password has to arrive at the computer eventually or you couldn't log in. What Lomenett guarantees is that a compromised computer only sees the passwords you typed on it, while they were typed, and never sees the vault, the PIN, or the other 999 entries.

Encryption buys time rather than permanence. Everything is crackable given enough time, and our job is to make that time so long, and the attempt limit so short, that a stolen Lomenett isn't worth anyone's trouble. We'd rather tell you that plainly than pretend otherwise.

If you want the full breakdown of what an attacker would actually have to do, we wrote it up in Our attack surface.