Fear and Loathing on your Desk: BadUSB, and what you should do about it

Presented at Kiwicon 9: Cyberwar Is Hell (2015), Dec. 10, 2015, 10:15 a.m. (30 minutes).

For over 15 years USB has been the universal computing peripheral interface. In simpler times the host computer and the USB device trusted each other, and so USB implementations historically placed little emphasis on security issues. But what if malicious firmware were loaded into a USB device? How can you protect yourself from BadUSB? This talk will review public implementations of BadUSB, and (the distinct lack of) available defensive techniques. A hardware gadget will then be presented to make most of your problems...disappear. Along the way we will cover embedded ARM development toolchains, and there might even be a demo and/or actual hardware on show.

Presenters:

• Robert Fisk
  Robert is an electronic engineer in Auckland, New Zealand. With an interest in defensive measures for targeted users, he has decided to stand up and use the Force for Good.

Links:

• https://2015.kiwicon.org/the-con/talks/#e197

Similar Presentations:

• DEF CON 17 (2009) / USB Attacks: Fun with Plug & 0wn
• 33C3 (2016) / No USB? No problem.: How to write an open source bit-bang low-speed USB stack running on a sub-$1 Cortex M0+
• ToorCon San Diego TwentyOne (2019) / Hacking Even More USB with USB-Tools