Am I the only one cringing at the use of the lone term "USB" to describe "USB flash drives" in this article? I would have expected more from Wired.
As for the actual flaw, yes that's true. But that's not what this article is talking about.
> You should read the article.
I did. It says:
> “People look at these things and see them as nothing more than storage devices,” says Caudill. “They don’t realize there’s a reprogrammable computer in their hands.”
It's clearly talking about the storage devices. If they were talking about the bus protocol they'd say "USB is nearly impossible to secure in its current form" instead of "USBs are nearly impossible to secure in their current form"
Possibly. I wouldn't care if it was speech. I wouldn't comment if it was a regular newspaper. But WIRED writing like this?
If we can pretend to be a mass storage, we could pretend to be a keyboard/mouse, too. It's a small matter of firwmare.
"... USBs are nearly impossible to secure in their current form."
"... silently disable a USB’s security feature that password-protects a certain portion of its memory."
Just substitute the name of any other interface - PS/2, HDMI, Thunderbolt, etc - to get a sense for how weird it sounds, e.g., "HDMIs are nearly impossible to secure".
Sometimes "USB thingy".