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1. If this is what a couple of smart guys can do as, essentially, a side project then I can only imagine what nation states with teams of people like this can accomplish.
2. I get why some orgs pour wax into the USB ports of their desktop machines.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other nifty thing about the plasma globe is that immediately after someone plugs it in, they are likely to be too distracted by the luminous fingers of writhing plasma to notice the shell window popping up briefly on the monitor. Nicely-executed hack on multiple levels. For the same reason, waiting a few minutes to pop up the shell, as the article says they did, actually seems counterproductive. It might have bee…
A power user wouldn't (shouldn't) expect a device merely using USB for power to pop up anything on the PC it's plugged into. That would be a dead giveaway that it's doing something it shouldn't be doing.
> The solution proved to be simple: we "borrowed" the USB vendor and product ID sent by an Apple-made keyboard taken from a coworker's desk. Looking at the prototype plasma globe sitting in my "old projects" box, it seems that we picked 05ac:024f. I'm a bit put out that that worked, although I'm struggling to think of a solution that doesn't involve going full-crypto (including a proper PKI to let vendors sign device…
You have to realize that it was never meant to be a security measure. It's only there to identify the device to the host system.
> The solution proved to be simple: we "borrowed" the USB vendor and product ID sent by an Apple-made keyboard taken from a coworker's desk. Looking at the prototype plasma globe sitting in my "old projects" box, it seems that we picked 05ac:024f. I'm a bit put out that that worked, although I'm struggling to think of a solution that doesn't involve going full-crypto (including a proper PKI to let vendors sign device…
>Another critical optimization boiled down to realizing that the response packet allows up to six keycodes to be reported at once. This might have seemed like a straightforward 6x speed gain, but not so: on MacOS, the keystrokes were dequeued not in the order they appeared in the packet, but from the numerically lowest scancode to the highest. This mind-boggling quirk [...] Reporting multiple keys down in the same pa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to realize that it was never meant to be a security measure. It's only there to identify the device to the host system.
Indeed, and the Keyboard Setup Assistant was never meant to be a security measure, either.
Reading articles like this always causes me to think two things: 1. If this is what a couple of smart guys can do as, essentially, a side project then I can only imagine what nation states with teams of people like this can accomplish. 2. I get why some orgs pour wax into the USB ports of their desktop machines.
However, I think the FAANG companies act somewhat more restricted. Three letter agencies don't have qualms about things like "chloroforming security guards" and such.
Also, use USB Data Blocker dongles where possible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other nifty thing about the plasma globe is that immediately after someone plugs it in, they are likely to be too distracted by the luminous fingers of writhing plasma to notice the shell window popping up briefly on the monitor. Nicely-executed hack on multiple levels. For the same reason, waiting a few minutes to pop up the shell, as the article says they did, actually seems counterproductive. It might have bee…
A power user wouldn't (shouldn't) expect a device merely using USB for power to pop up anything on the PC it's plugged into. That would be a dead giveaway that it's doing something it shouldn't be doing.
However, if this happened on my Mac I would immediately be skeptical.