Hardware

USaBUSe Linux updates

10 March 2017 ~5 min By Rogan Dawes
Abuse Backdoor Build-It Conferences Empire Exploit Hardware Internals Linux Metasploit Programming Real-World Research Shells Tunnelling
(If you’re new to this project, read the intro first) For the past few months, I’ve been working on porting the USaBUSe stack from the custom hardware (AVR+ESP8266) to the Linux USB gadget stack. I wanted to make the techniques more accessible to people unfamiliar with embedded development, and I also wanted to take advantage of the variety of possibilities inherent in having a fully featured Linux environment to work in. I presented this work at HackCon in Norway.

Universal Serial aBUSe

15 August 2016 ~12 min By Dominic White
Defcon Hardware Usb
Last Saturday, at Defcon 24, we gave a talk entitled “Universal Serial aBUSe: Remote Physical Access Attacks” about some research we had performed into USB attacks. The talk was part of a research theme we’ve been pursuing related to hardware bypasses of software security. We decided to look into these sorts of attacks after noting their use in real world attacks. For example, you have “Apex predators” such as the NSA’s extensive use of sophisticated hardware implants, most notably for this work, the COTTONMOUTH devices. On the other end of the scale, we noticed real world criminals in the UK and ZA making use of unsophisticated hardware devices, such as hardware keyloggers, drive imagers and physical VPN devices and successfully making off with millions. This led us to hypothesise that there’s probably a large series of possible attacks in between these two extremes. We also noted that there’s not many decent defences against these sorts of attacks, it’s 2016, and the only decent defence against decent hardware keyloggers is still to “manually inspect all USB ports” (assuming this stuff is even visible).