Great, now China's going to put malware into every Xbox controller on the off-chance it gets inserted into a USN submarine /s
And what is the plan in 20-30 years' time when the submarines are still in action but the controllers stopped being made? I get the feeling we'll see Navy personnel bidding on "vintage" Xbox controller auctions on eBay the same way prices for original NES and Atari controllers are through the roof right now.
but my thought exacty: put a prepared controller to "game room" (sure there is such a thing on a nuclear sub). sabotage controllers. wait until one in "game room" gets plugged into periscope. Profit.
I'll concede that may be a feature of the allocation protocol running on top of USB (PictBridge?) but that still means that mutual identification over USB is still possible. I'm pretty sure it's in the USB HID spec that the Xbox controllers implement.
Replace Ebay with flea market and this is how in the second half of 199x some spare parts for Soviet/Russian space station "Mir" (and for some other space projects, well into beginning of 200x) were procured. With USSR falling and economy tanking/changing/"privatized in all senses and at all scales" many typical sources for space parts just disappeared and/or stopped working.