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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

I think that response increasingly makes no sense (as time passes). Mozilla prevents people from building apps that access their devices because it might be possible to do something malicious.

I am so tired of being treated like a drooling idiot "for my own good".

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The worry is real: there has historically not been a meaningful security barrier between a USB device and software running on the machine it's connected to. Firmware hasn't been developed with the assumption that the machine is malicious, there's probably lots of firmware which you can get RCE on by sending a weirdly formatted USB packet. Lots of devices have pretty unrestricted firmware update via USB functionality. And security is often fairly lax the other direction too; at least Linux implicitly assumes that hardware you connect is trusted, and there are lots of old, insecure drivers for USB devices out there.

Do users understand that by clicking "allow" on a website, an attacker can re-flash their mouse with firmware which causes the mouse to present itself as some obscure USB device which activates a vulnerable driver? That by clicking "allow" on a pop-up from a website, the website can abuse their keyboard to install a key logger or botnet? Should a user be expected to understand this?

I don't know how valid this fear is in practice. Has anyone done a study?

But that isn't how it works, it's not a prompt like asking permission to use the camera allow/deny. The user gets presented with list of compatible devices and they have to select one themselves.

An attacker could try to convince users to select something specific but that depends on the actual devices that are present and the "default" option to a confused non-technical person is to just cancel out of the list.

I know it works like that, the part about "clicking allow'" was a slight oversimplification which doesn't change the point. Do users understand the security implications of giving access to a device in the pop-up? I don't think so.

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