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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

There was a thing that was around 10 or 11 years ago called "Wireless USB", and it was actually kind of cool. It did exactly what it sounds like, you could plug in two different arbitrary USB devices into hubs or a computer that supported wireless USB, and the computer would just recognize it as a vanilla USB device. I don't actually know why it never caught on, I thought it was neat, and it seemed to work fine. I guess due to the popularity and ubiquity of bluetooth?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_USB

EDIT: Looks like it was more than 10 years ago, circa 2009 or so. Time has no meaning.

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First time I heard about Wireless USB was just the other day, in a video looking at a luggable computer from 2006.

https://youtu.be/OO5hYhdxIuk

Video is worth a watch although it also doesn’t give an answer for why Wireless USB actually disappeared.

I was wondering after watching that video, if it could be due to security concerns? Like, is the Wireless USB protocol encrypted? And if so, does it use sufficiently strong encryption?

I did find a document that talks a bit about Wireless USB encryption.

https://cdn.teledynelecroy.com/files/appnotes/wireless_usb_e...

I actually saw that video, but I had heard of Wireless USB for awhile. My manager at my first job after dropping out of college the first time got it for his computer and he was super excited.

At least according to Wikipedia, it was encrypted.

There's "encrypted", and there's encrypted. WEP for wifi was encryption, but cracking it was so trivial that for some years it was practical to crack yourself access to wifi wherever you were on a casual whim.

Still, even if the encryption was very weak, wireless wifi sounds appealing to me, at least for my old trusty wired mouse. Somebody snooping on or spoofing my mouse seems like an academic threat.

> Somebody snooping on or spoofing my mouse seems like an academic threat.

You're not concerned that anyone within a 100 ft radius of you can inject arbitrary keystrokes/mouse movements to your PC?

No, definitely not. The intersection of people who would think to do that, have the skill for it, and the inclination to view me personally as their target is probably zero.

Not to mention that I don't think anyone but a few niche enthusiasts even have the hardware to do it even if they had the skills and inclination. Who's going to walk around with a 15 year old laptop brute-forcing wireless USB encryption, or find some obscure hub and do it on a modern laptop?

I'm not going to say the likelihood is "zero", but I am going to say it's so close to zero that it's really not worth even considering.

Might be possible to do with SDR rather than needing the original hardware. Not that this makes it super more likely.

Anyone within a 100 ft radius of my PC is in my house and could just come over and poke at the mouse.

That's somehow both a much less elaborate and significantly more invasive approach to pranking wfh coworkers.

> wfh coworkers

I usually call her my girlfriend, but I suppose that’s another way to refer to one’s significant other :p

I inadvertently pranked myself like this. For a while my laptop got super haunted, occasionally the cursor would jiggle slightly even when I wasn’t touching the mouse. Eventually I realised that the Bluetooth mouse in my bag which I’d totally forgotten about was getting bumped and turning on.

Or in the apartment or condominium above or below you across any of a few floors, depending on shielding. For those not living in standalone houses.

Imagine someone driving around neighborhoods with a laptop and a very good antenna.

1. Detect vulnerable networks in computers

2. Pretend to be a USB keyboard.

3. Trigger blind key combos that will visit a website, confirm downloading a file, execute that file, and "OK" privilege escalation prompts.

4. Move on to the next block or cul-de-sac, while the malware finishes unpacking and reporting home for further use.

That doesn't need wireless USB, we already have CVE-2023-45866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38661182 for "bluetooth stack more than 6 months old"

Yeah, that has been a thing since the last millenium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardriving

It was a very limited implementation of wireless USB. You could only plug in two USB devices and only particular devices worked, if I remember correctly. My suspicion is that the reason it went off the market was because it used UWB and the government put a lot of restrictions on its use so that it couldn't be repurposed for use in military applications. It's very difficult to intercept an encrypted UWB communication link, or to even know it is present. It essentially just looks like a slight raising of the noise floor across a wide band of frequencies. UWB was required to get the necessary bandwidth, doing USB across WiFi would probably cause timing errors in devices because it would be so slow (at least using 802.11b which was in wide use at the time). I think hardware makers really hated the idea also because a successful wireless USB system would allow sharing hardware between many computers instead of buying a device per computer (consumer NAS was expensive back then). It was also very expensive, about $400 I think, which was a lot at the time for something that had limited functionality. I remember thinking about buying one and decided it wasn't worth it.

I remember actually testing that stuff out when it came out. I was working as an intern at Philips Semiconductors in their Wi-Fi chip division. Speaking of time has no meaning... :)

I think there were a couple of consumer products that got released - Linksys and netgear perhaps? They consisted of a USB Hub + Dongle.

They actually worked ok, but the speed would drop off quickly with distance. Across the room, and you'd be at 50% of the rated speed, at best.

The technology was interesting. Basically they were transmitting over a whole slew of spectrum simultaneously (from like 2.5GHz to 5.5GHz), but they kept the transmit power low enough that it didn't exceed some FCC threshold.

Wireless USB was also the format used by the Xbox 360 controllers.

Huh. I had a 360 controller and a wireless adapter for my pc. It died a few years back though.

Does that mean they’ll work with any wireless USB adapter? I have a 360 controller but haven’t been able to source a USB dongle to use it with my computer.

Interesting that you can't find one. I got one a few years ago when I built a little emulator system out of a Pi. Works fine. I can't remember where I got it, though. I thought eBay, but I don't see it in my purchase history.

They're easy to find.... https://www.amazon.com/s?k=xbox+controller+dongle

AFAICT those are almost all for later Xbox controllers which are built on Bluetooth.

No, they work on whatever their custom wireless protocol is. I use one all the time.

There isn't one custom protocol.

360 used wireless USB. Xbox One on uses Bluetooth.

I recently found out that a manufacturer (TI, NXP, murata, infineon?) was demonstrating a USB2 live camera capture using a UWB (Ultra-Wide-Band) short range wireless transmission. But I can't found the source again.

When Mac first took out the DVD drive, there was also a away to mount remote DVD drive. I guess the push was to get everyone on the network. So stuff like that just didn't take off.

I've been saying this should be a thing for decades. Not sure why I never heard of this.

Most USB devices either rely on the connection to provide power or are too clunky to move around, so having a wire doesn't really matter.

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