This story is a part of Hive Students’ Projects Showcase, where students share their talents, endeavours, experiences, and projects. In these student written articles Hivers present their work, the challenges they might have faced and the learnings they gathered.
Tassu Passu - the first human-friendly password manager
Inspiration
In 2018, I spent the whole year volunteering in a kindergarten in Tallinn, Estonia. I was teaching preschoolers English, and went with them to zoos and museums. Also, I was helping teachers to teach robotics and programming to children. Every month they received a new robot and I was taking it home for a few days to find ways to use it for educational purposes.
I grew up in an Ukrainian village and I couldn’t even imagine that such tools for education existed. When I first moved to Estonia to do my voluntary service, I had to adapt to how smart the kids were, and I kept asking if they would receive a university degree after their graduation from kindergarten.
In the middle of my service, I’ve got an idea to create a platform for small children where they can learn programming without even knowing how to read or write, with pictures and stories. It should be so intuitive, that even my little 5 y.o. sister from a Ukrainian village could learn programming. I got a scholarship to study UX design when I pitched the idea at a local startup hub.
Building a product for such an audience would mean it has to be super intuitive, understandable even for babies, and accessible. That’s what I decided to focus on while studying UX design.
It Ain’t Happening
While the idea of building such a platform for small children was unrealised, it kept popping up in my head. I started visiting different events and hackathons. I was pitching my idea, but not many people were interested in it. So I was joining teams with other ideas and we kept winning those competitions. I felt that my UX design skills contributed a lot to the teams. I noticed that many people don’t see the visuals the same way as I do.
Tassu Passu
I love meeting new people, so in 2019 I decided to participate in Junction hackathon. It’s the biggest hackathon in Europe with over 1500 participants. My goal was to join a team of people I hadn't met before. There was a matchmaking event where we had to follow some signs like “What OS do you use?”, or “What do you prefer, burgers or pizza?”. I ended up talking to a group of people that had an idea about creating passwords out of pictures, so preschoolers could safely login to their accounts online.
Designing a product so simple, that it can be used by babies and their grannies; I couldn’t think of a better job I could have in the upcoming 48 hours.
In our team we also have three others. Tulika, who loves to tell stories and writes novels. Reinis, who knows very well how to sell stuff, had a startup in Silicon Valley for which he raised $1,2 million. And Ronalds, who attended over 40 hackathons and is a very experienced back-end developer.
When I was working in kindergarten, kids loved to share stories about their favourite YouTubers. While picking our Junction challenge, we did research on kids’ security awareness. We found out that there are millions of preschool kids who use smartphones and tablets. Many of them have accounts on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok. Let’s be honest, we all know that most of the subscribers of PewDiePie are preschoolers. Kids keep forgetting their passwords or they create really simple ones which are easy to hack.
My brother who is 14 years old has over 10 email accounts because he keeps forgetting his passwords and my mom who is 44 has the same simple password on all her social media and email accounts. The problem of safe passwords applies across all age categories. For now we decided to focus on the most vulnerable and unrecognised by the market - preschool children.
Our solution to the problem was Tassu Passu. A cute password manager app for small kids where you create a story instead of password to log on to websites and apps. We love to call it a new way of authentication, because it basically is. We couldn’t find anything similar among our competitors.
Let’s see how it works. First I’m going to set up my own Tassu Passu story. I’ll choose my favourite character, let it be a cow 🐮. My cow eats avocado 🥑, travels by UFO 🛸, lives in a tent 🏕, and once saw a superhero 🦸🏻♀️. Hurray! We’ve created a simple story which is super easy to remember.
Tassu Passu is secured by blockchain technology and additional 2 step verification. So actually 🐮🥑🛸🏕🦸🏻♀️ approximately equals 2e8c1d9adce0c19fa77d0ac23692ef2446596d18b129c5de5458456572f74c82601cb29c44c9794dcb320281909a62c978087f71530542e5ba69159cff4dc29b.
Now you can access your dashboard, which has all your websites and apps. Adult users get a different interface with a password manager, options to add kids, and control the access to their websites and apps.
Tassu Passu lets you safely forget all your passwords. You can access all your accounts with one simple story.
In Conclusion
Writing this story in the era of COVID-19 made me think how much Tassu Passu would help parents around the globe. Kids spend a lot of their time online, they have classes through Zoom, and they communicate with friends and relatives via video calls.
For a parent, a child’s safety is the most important thing in the world. But it’s hard for parents to control their kids’ access online, while neglecting their own safety. There’s no tool that can be easily used by parents and their children at the same time. Tassu Passu, the junction of art, cybersecurity, and storytelling is going to fight a war against identity theft and insecure passwords.