The Seeeduino is being resold as a ThinkPad password recovery tool:
the only Affordable Fully Assembled, Programmed and Tested unlimited use USB based ThinkPad Supervisor Password Recovery or Clear Tools in the world.
Joe’s KeyMaker KMX1 can Recover or Clear Supervisor Password from all current ThinkPad models with the exception of the SL400 and SL500 series, it can do this even if TPM security has been enabled
This came through the contact form with a negative comment. We posted it because it’s interesting to see the Arduino used in a niche product, especially in a gray-market product that otherwise might not be possible. This is closed source, but it seems like a similar open source firmware could be loaded onto any Arduino.
It seems they’re just fiddling with an I2C eeprom on the laptop. Does anyone have one of these? You could hook a bus-pirate up and figure out what they’re doing then.
On some of the ThinkPad models, the passwords are stored unencrypted on the EEPROM. For those, you can just read the data from the EEPROM to get the password. There is information on how to do that at (the period at the end is part of the URL)
For some of the newer models, the passwords are stored cryptographically, so the only option is to overwrite the contents of the EEPROM. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any free software for doing this. It probably wouldn’t be too hard to figure out given an EEPROM dump before and after setting a password.
The URL didn’t seem to post in my last comment. Trying again:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Maintenance#Recovering_BIOS_passwords.
(the period at the end is part of the URL)