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Comment by admax88q | Hacker News Reader

The firmware on a USB stick should not be writeable.

When will you ever update the firmware on your storage device. Never, USB sticks are cheap and disposable. Mass produced ones should have their firmware burned into ROM.

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When? All the damned time. Maybe you have an external HD or SSD based on USB, updating the firmware is perfectly acceptable. Same thing for HIDs and NICs. High performance USB drives are basically little SSDs, and there's plenty of reasons for wanting to update the controller firmware on them to improve features or performance.

It should not, however, be generally possible for arbitrary programs to update the firmware on a USB device without both the consent of the computer host's current user/administrator AND the device's manufacturer (subject to certain hedges and caviats of course). Right now many USB devices are just wide open, allowing this chaos of security vulnerabilities, that should not be.

This does nothing to protect you. Malicious users will just make their own usb stick. The parts aren't exactly expensive.

Of course it does something to protect me. It means that I can plug my USB drive into a friend's computer, then plug it back into my own computer without worry.

Only if you fully trust the entire supply chain down to you. Do you have any way to verify that the mass storage device you bought was not a forgery?

I'm not aiming for perfection, just aiming to improve. It is easier for me to trust that the sealed USB drive I bought has not been tampered with than it is for me to trust that all of my friends are knowledgeable and avoid malware.

yes I agree that this looks like a good step, vendors should also probably release some tools to verify the integrity of their firmwares if possible.

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