Black Hat
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2014–2019
44:31 · 147K views · Aug 11, 2014
Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell present BadUSB at Black Hat 2014, showing that USB controller firmware can be reprogrammed to impersonate other device types. They demonstrate system compromise and a self-replicating USB threat that current defenses cannot detect.
HN uses it as the standard reference for why USB devices are dangerous beyond ordinary viruses.
4 comments from Hacker News
For anyone interested in the subject I recommend watching the presentation [1] by by Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell at Black Hat USA 2014. [1] this video
The NSA have been using Hard Drive Firmware exploits for years. Such an attack could hide malware that also survives a format[0] (Which is why I brought up a drive replacement in my prev post). I wouldn't be surprised if the same can't be done with SSD Firmware too (we have already seen people do "bad things" with USB Memory sticks [1]) Also if a full BIOS flash has been performed you might be SOL as after a power cycle the modified BIOS is now the first thing loaded by your system (Or it might be the VBIOS, its been a while.) which could prevent future flashing of the BIOS or fake the flashing process but not actually flash anything. If you have a board that can recovery flash you might be able to recover but how do you trust the system afterwards? As the BIOS is usually stored on a SPI Flash you could use an external programmer to dump the content of the flash and do a diff on the firmware file. You have to think about who is your attacker. Are the Kiddies going to go to such lengths to stay persistent on a consumers laptop they use as a facebook machine? Prob not. But is it outside the scope of a determined attacker (or nation state) who managed to get a first stage attack malware inside a large company? IMO it would depend on how valuable they determine access to your network / data is. [0] [LINK] [1] this video EDIT: I've not spoke about VBIOS infections as the GPU Vendors on at least modern cards have been really locking down their GPUS and as far as I've seen, I've yet to
On the one hand, this looks incredibly cool. On the other hand, I actually find it a bit worrying. With things like BadUSB[1] still out there, I would be worried about anything that gives USB devices more wide reach or higher privileges. That this project aims to offer "full functionality" of the device, afaik, means it is likely doing exactly the kind of thing that I find worrying. Can anyone talk about this a little more in-depth? [1] this video
Since sharing USB flash drives is pretty much the equivalent of having digital unprotected sex anyway, I'm sure you'll get that soon enough. And it can get much, much worse than plain old viruses too: this video