{"id":856,"date":"2009-02-09T07:49:30","date_gmt":"2009-02-09T15:49:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cubist.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/?p=856"},"modified":"2009-02-09T07:49:31","modified_gmt":"2009-02-09T15:49:31","slug":"usb-power-in-airports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/2009\/02\/09\/usb-power-in-airports\/","title":{"rendered":"USB power in airports"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I noticed that the Denver airport has upgraded its power stands to include USB ports that presumably give power to recharge devices like cell phones, iPhones, and iPods. What I wonder is how I know that&#8217;s all that&#8217;s going on. I know that, at least for my old iPod shuffle and one of my cell phones, some of these devices don&#8217;t authenticate the computers they plug into, but simply appear as R\/W flash drives. What&#8217;s to stop a malicious version of this kiosk from<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>taking inventory of my files?<\/li>\n<li>figuring out who I am and tracking me?<\/li>\n<li>installing autorun software (like a virus) onto my device?<\/li>\n<li>copying my contacts, my email, my cell phone pictures, my mp3s, etc?<\/li>\n<li>&lt;your idea here&gt;?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know whether this particular power stand does anything more complicated than supplying power and ground to the right two pins, and I suppose that by paying attention (to the screen on a cell phone or the lights on an iPod shuffle) you might be able to tell if serial communication were initiated and something fishy was going on. But that doesn&#8217;t provide much comfort; in the end what we need is a good way for portable devices to verify the authenticity of the device to which they connect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I noticed that the Denver airport has upgraded its power stands to include USB ports that presumably give power to recharge devices like cell phones, iPhones, and iPods. What I wonder is how I know that&#8217;s all that&#8217;s going on. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/2009\/02\/09\/usb-power-in-airports\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":123,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physicalsecurity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/123"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=856"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":859,"href":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions\/859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secblog.cs.washington.edu\/Security\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}