Tried it, phone said the power didnt feel the same.
Yes, Yes, Yes… iOS devices are unbreakable andNEVER have any issue - whatsoever. Never mind jailbreaking them. :smack:
Book of Job’s - verse 17:83
According to that link:
It is using the power rails to send the negotiation data
This is probably done so the data lines are left undisturbed for communication.
Under the previous charging shemes you couldn’t fast charge and communicate with a device at the same time.
Seems to me that, if you’re going to have to carry a “condom,” you might as well carry a full adapter, and then there was no need for USB charging stations at all.
I’d prefer some sort of switch on the device that would make the (micro)USB port power only. But people have been slow to see the problem with security and USB.
What Chronos describes–about pretending to be a different device–is an exploit I’ve heard about since 2012 at a TED talk, and so far I’ve not seen anything done about it. The most basic, of prompting when you plug in a new device (and telling you what kind of device it claims to be), hasn’t been done, let alone more complicated stuff like requiring certificates.
Well, some phones do have that when you plug it in. You can choose from different data transfer types or “charge only”, which I hope does what it says.
My android device does something similar. If it can sense another device at the end of the USB connection, it asks if you would like to enable communication over USB (which will turn off certain apps and functions).
There is exploits for OS X but they are patched much more quickly than the mess that is the Android / phone maker / carrier system:
As far as I know there has never been an exploit for iOS that worked merely by connecting a USB cable and its fair to say that iOS is generally much more secure than Android.
A reminder about the point I made above; all the security settings on your phone, it asking permission to access the device, ensuring the device is what it says it is, all assume that the USB device is behaving itself, and not mounting a low level attack. If the USB attack is using such exploits as possible buffer overruns, protocol violations or timing violations, the USB controller in your phone will be compromised before the phone OS realises that anything has happened. Such attacks are specific to individual implementations of USB controller hardware and firmware. This is a mixed thing. Your phone might be immune to the exploit, but if it is vulnerable, a software update to the phone’s OS might not be able to fix the problem. A power management protocol encoded over the power wires is another, separate, vector.
Such exploits are extremely difficult, simply because there is scant publicly available information on the IP blocks used. But by the same token, once an exploit is found, it is very hard to kill off. I would expect that national security agencies would be the ones to show the most interest in investing the effort.
The short answer is that yes, it is an attack vector that can be exploited. Anywhere there are public charging stations, I use my own power adapter and cord. It’s a trivial amount of extra weight and volume to carry the adapter with the cord. I also have a small battery backup I use. I would never plug my device directly into a USB port in a public area, as I just don’t trust them.
I might use it to charge up my battery backup, as there isn’t really any code in there that could be exploited. It not like these things are self-replicating, heh heh heh…right?
Sure, but just saying Android doesn’t mean the same as iOS, since iOS exclusively runs on Apple products and is geared for exactly those few Apple devices by Apple – getting THAT wrong is way worse and sloppy, compared to creating an OS like Android that runs on several thousand different devices by several hundred manufacturer.
If you have a cheap Android, they are crap, security is poor and the Android implantation is badly and cheaply done, but blatantly assuming that Android as a whole is inferior because of that is just narrow minded.
That’s an assumption. I don’t know enough about what’s actually inside one these days.
But if it contains any processor at all, it’s at least theoretically hackable / hijackable. If it’s purely wires, Li-ion or whatever cells, and maybe a couple discrete transistors you’re safe. Otherwise you’re only probably safe.
Agreed. I haven’t worked on one of them, but it wouldn’t surprise me if some used a simple embedded linux like image to manage the charge/discharge, because it’s just a quick way to get stuff to talk. If that’s the case, I could imagine there being exploits.
I seriously doubt it.
Most USB chargers are extremely cost-sensitive, which means using a processor that costs in the sub-dollar range. Those are going to be 8 bit devices with a few K of RAM and up to 128K of Flash. You won’t find even the most stripped-down Linux distro that will run on that kind of puny hardware.
Some discussion here.
I think you are seriously overestimating the risk. Yes its a hypothetical attack vector. However can anyone provide a cite to a single documented case of a public USB charger being set up in this way and used to successfully infect phones? For the attack to work on the average phone thats plugged in to it has to have exploit code for each specific USB controller chip, firmware revision and possibly even chipset revision.
If you’re wanting to infect mobile phones en-mass there is much lower hanging fruit which doesn’t involve hacking low level firmware, eg attacks via webpages, MMS messages and fake app installations with trojans.
For the tinfoil hat wearers out there, you can buy a “charge only” usb cable that lacks the communication pins. I think this limits you to the older slow-charge protocols, but PortaPow makes one that should work with the newer fast-charge specifications.
No ram or flash in a charger. I can’t imagine any company would make a charger that would use a comparatively expensive microcontroller(which they would have to write software for) when they could use one of the many purpose built IC’s that do the job.
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/IW1691-08-1691-08-IWATT-SOP-8/32479164252.html
I completely agree, from a technical perspective.
I’ve just worked for enough high tech companies that do seemingly stupid things for non-technical reasons, that I can imaging some odd situations.
For instance - back when I worked in cell phones, we liked to put a accessories ‘in box’ for the customer. The cost of the accessories was rolled into the overall cost of the product, and then subsidized by the carrier. So we got guaranteed sales of the accessory without the end user really seeing the price.
We also did lifetime buys of chips, and believed heavily in the miracle of platform based solutions.
It wouldn’t shock me if somewhere out there was a charger solution that came out of this type of setup…cost not being a factor…time to market, required oddball safety mechanism, lack of time or staff to do what everyone knows is the easy way…
Not saying it’s common, or would even have any level of market penetration. Just that I can picture it actually existing.
I was actually thinking along the same lines. There probably is some kind of fancy “smart charger” that’s got zigbee or zwave and does have some kind of processor. Like a Nest for chargers. Nest is like the high tech solution to a problem nobody has(I have one fwiw).
I remember a story (I think in Wired) of a company that was at an Information Security conference and offered free phone charging. Their presentation was on how they had now installed malware an everyone’s phone that had used their charger.