IvyLock is a program that allows you to lock individual programs on your PC behind password / biometric authentication. I wrote this for the Technology Student Association competition in high school.

On Windows, it isn’t really possible to intercept a program before it launches without getting into nasty kernel level-stuff and essentially pretending to be either a debugger or an antivirus. Instead, this program works by watching for new processes and instantly suspending any processes that require authentication until the user enters the password.

A screenshot of IvyLock’s settings page.

A mockup of IvyLock’s lock screen. In the final version, the user could either enter a pasword or scan their fingerprint. My laptop at the time didn’t have a fingerprint scanner, so I used an external USB scanner.

At the time, there was no convenient way to access Windows’ biometric APIs from a WPF app, so I wrote a native module in Microsoft’s bizarre C++/CX variant to get access to Windows Biometric Framework.