Welcome to the world of Biohacking!

Previously, our Founder, Alex Lennon has installed an xNT NFC Chip which he uses on a daily basis to unlock the RFID secured doors at DoES Liverpool. After years of success using this product, Alex has decided to take a step further into the biohacking world! 

Alex has recently installed a chip in his arm which allows him to perform a variety of actions, such as uploading applets.

The device Alex has installed into his hand is a VivoKey Apex Flex, which can be seen below:

VivoKey Apex Flex chip

The Apex Flex is a patent pending subdermal contactless secure element enabling fully autonomous separation of your cryptographic keys and functions from vulnerable general computing platforms such as your smartphone or computer. The ability to not only carry your OTP, PGP, and other cryptographic keys with you at all times, but also perform cryptographic functions in vivo (generate OTP codes, encrypt & decrypt data, etc.) without ever revealing private keys to the NFC interface you are interacting with is a huge step forward for personal digital identity and data security. – dangerousthings.com

VivoKey has already created a few applets to use with the Apex Flex, including:

  • OTP
  • NAK
  • NDEF
  • U2F
  • PGP

Alex has already began playing around with what the VivoKey Apex Flex is capable of. Take a look at the video below for an interesting glimpse of what Alex can do with his new implant:

Alex says, 

I’ve wanted to start looking at strong digital authentication based on a “proxy digital me” for many years. You may have seen I’ve had an RFID tag in my hand for 3 years or so which I’ve been using to unlock the doors in my office at DoES Liverpool. However this is easily cloned. Enter the Dangerous Things Apex Flex, an NXP P71 JavaCard OS computer chip which I can run my own applications on and which communicates over NFC. The clever people at Dangerous Things have been writing and porting various applets including OTP, HMAC/SHA and most recently PGP. In this video, I show how I can now use private GPG/SSH keys stored in my hand to sign my code commits and authenticate to SSH servers to send those commits up to the cloud.

Shortly after releasing this video, Alex was enable to come up with a quick fix which disables the need to type in a pin every time he scans his hand on the NFC reader. This enables for a much more smoother experience and lets Alex simply wave his hand to authenticate actions on his computer.

See the fix here.

Alex says

I’ve managed to eliminate the requirement for PIN entry by building my own pinentry-gnome3 utility.

We think it’s incredible that Alex has had this procedure done as he is one of the first in the world to have a crypto implant installed such as this one.

Let us know what you think of Alex’s new implant or if you have any ideas about what Alex could do with the Apex Flex!

To learn more about biohacking and human implant technology, please visit dangerousthings.com.

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