New 'USG' Firewalls Protect USB Drives From Malicious Attacks (zdnet.com)

A developer has created the USG, "a small, portable hardware USB firewall...to prevent malicious USB sticks and devices laden with malware from infecting your computer." An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: The problem is that most computers automatically trust every USB device that's plugged in, which means malicious code can run without warning... Cars, cash registers, and some ATMs also come with USB ports, all of which can be vulnerable to cyberattacks from a single USB stick. That's where the USG firewall comes in...a simple hardware serial link that only accepts a very few select number of safe commands, which prevents the device from executing system commands or intercepting network traffic. That means the data can flow from the USB device, but [it] effectively blocks other USB exploits.
The firmware has been open sourced, and the technical specifications have also been released online "to allow anyone to build their own from readily available development boards."

Comments

Bad Keyboard Still Possible

[mentil]

As far as I could glean from the article, the USG does nothing to stop USB devices from registering as a keyboard and then emulating keypresses to open up a back door. Having a physical switch on the USG that indicates 'this device is a keyboard' could stop that... for malicious devices that aren't actually USB keyboards.

I'm also skeptical hat the 'short list of approved commands' is 100% safe and there are no driver vulnerabilities linked to any of those commands. Also, if you plug a new USB device in thru this USG and it doesn't work, are you going to say 'too bad, probably infected', or are you going to remove the USG and try again?