USB Security Token

[Inafking]

The point of it interfacing as a keyboard would be to keep it from being attacked by malicious software. As long as you can't send code to it, it can't be infected. Also, if you don't know that batteries die, and that they're an important part of what the security token does then I'm not sure how to explain this all to you anyway.

[Atomic_Skull]

A USB security dongle could be nearly 100% secure if they used real time network encryption.

All network traffic between SE's servers and FFXI's client would be routed through the dongle, which would encrypt it. Each dongle would have a unique key and use AES encryption. Nobody would be breaking it anytime soon and even if they did it would only break that individual dongle not all of them. (this would be possible, but would take a decades long brute force attack to break per dongle, so AES is effectively unbreakable)

No dongle, no connection. The only possible way to get at your account would be to hijack your computer and redirect network traffic from a remote computer through the dongle attached to your PC's USB port. And the only thing you'd need to do to put a stop to that would be to yank out the dongle.

So you would have near 100% invulnerability to hacking, the only possible way you could be hacked if you left your dongle in your PC and someone hijacked it while you were away.


If you didn't want the inconvenience of having to insert and remove the dongle you could just put a mechanical switch on it that turns it on and off (you don't want this controlled though software, only a mechanical switch is secure)