Extracting Data With USB HID

January 26, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 59 Comments

sd_adaptor

High security workstations have some pretty peculiar ways of securing data. One of these is disabling any USB flash drives that may find their way into a system’s USB port. Security is a cat and mouse game, so of course there’s a way around these measures. [d3ad0ne] came up with a way of dumping files onto an SD card by using the USB HID protocol.

We’ve seen this sort of thing before where a microcontroller carries an executable to extract data. Previously, the best method was to blink the Caps Lock LED on a keyboard, sending one bit at a time to a micocontroller. [d3ad0ne]’s build exploits the USB HID protocol, but instead of 1 bit per second, he’s getting about 10kBps.

To extract data from a system, [ d3ad0ne] connects a Teensy microcontroller to the USB port. After opening up Notepad, [ d3ad0ne] mashes the Caps Lock key to force the Teensy to type out a script that can be made into an executable. This executable is a bare-bones application that can send any file back over the USB cable to the Teensy where it’s stored on an SD card. Short of filling the USB ports in a workstation with epoxy, there’s really no way to prevent secure files from leaking out of a computer.

Adding Shoulder Buttons To An RC Transmitter

January 26, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

radio

[Gerard] does puppeteering and animatronics work, and to remotely control his creations and characters he uses an off-the-shelf remote control radio. It’s you basic 6-channel setup, but [Gerard] wanted a way to control eye blinks and other simple actions with the press of a button. Sure, he could use the toggle switches on his transmitter, but he wanted something that wouldn’t require turning a servo on and off again. To fix this problem, [Gerard] added shoulder buttons to his transmitter with only a little bit of soldering.

[Gerard]’s transmitter uses toggle switches to send a signal on channels five and six. To add his push buttons, he simply drilled a hole in the plastic enclosure, installed a pair of push buttons, and wired them in parallel to the toggle switches.

Now [Gerard] has momentary switches on channels five and six, perfect for making his creations blink. Since the buttons are wired in parallel with the switches, flicking the switches to the ‘on’ position in effect takes the button out of the circuit, just in case the transmitter gets jostled around.

Gizmo Board, A Tiny X86 Dev Board

January 26, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 86 Comments

Gizmo

With the Raspberry Pi and sever other ARM dev boards seeing their time in the lime light, it’s no surprise other chip manufacturers would want to get in on the action. AMD is releasing a very tiny x86 dev board called the Gizmo, a four-inch square board that shrinks a desktop computer down to the palm of your hand.

The Gizmo is powered by a dual-core x86 Brazos CPU running at 1 GHz with an included Radeon HD 6250 graphics engine. Also on the board is 1GB of DDR3 RAM, a SATA, Ethernet, USB, VGA, Audio, PCI and PCIe ports, and a ton of GPIO pins that include ADCs and DACs. All this in a four-inch square package that boasts about twice the performance of a Raspberry Pi.

While the price of the Gizmo – $200 for an explorer kit – will probably preclude it from being as popular as a Raspberry Pi or other ARM board, sometimes you just need an x86 platform to do the job. With the powerful graphics potential of the Gizmo, we could easily see this board being used in a few computer vision or autonomous robot builds.

Pinoccio – An Ecosystem For The Internet Of Things

January 26, 2013 by Jeremy Cook 40 Comments

[Pinoccio] is currently an Indeigogo crowd-sourced project that aims use the real-world programmability of the Arduino through the internet using a wifi connection. One could rightly point out that this can already be done through the use of a wifi shield. Before ruling this device out, just “shush your shussins” and consider that it’s designed specifically for interfacing with “things” over the internet. This can replace several components (see 1:10 in the video after the break) and should be less of a hassle.

Additionally, with a shield on one of these devices, several other [Pinoccio] boards can communicate with the Internet using this as a hub in a mesh network. This is similar to how the many “smart” electrical meters work, with a grid router being a central hub for communications. Additionally, this board has a built in temperature sensor and a RGB (instead of a single-color) LED, so you can do some interesting stuff with it right out of the box. Assuming this project gets funded, which seems likely at this point, we’re excited to see the projects that get built using it! Continue reading “Pinoccio – An Ecosystem For The Internet Of Things” →