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Re:Federal agency destroyed computers, keyboards, mice over ... by rdl on Thursday July 11, 2013 @02:16AM (#6024723)
I don't think you actually need to do the keyboard thing.

You should be able to use "accessibility" features to bring up a soft keyboard (or just cut and paste from known things) to run the entire attack as a normal-appearing HID mouse, which just happens to be evil. No need to reconnect via a hub; you could do the whole thing within a mouse controller. Bonus points if you can manage to fit all the logic in the same processor/memory the thing includes by default, or something which looks like the same physical package and thus passes a non-destructive open-device analysis.

(which is kind of terrifying if you think about it; almost no one checks the provenance of "dumb" devices like mice. Keyboards sometimes get a tiny bit more scrutiny due to hardware keyloggers inside inline, but that's about it.)

The ultimate solution is a trusted supply chain and equipment which is tamper-evident, non-counterfeitable, and which can securely attest to intactness and provenance; x9.9 pinpads and hsms. But no one does that for general purpose hardware.

Re:Federal agency destroyed computers, keyboards, mice over ... by akira2501 on Thursday July 11, 2013 @04:25AM (#6025014)
Except the mouse doesn't know exactly where it is on the screen, or how it's concept of CPI (counts per inch) relates to pixels on the screen.
Re:Federal agency destroyed computers, keyboards, mice over ... by rdl on Thursday July 11, 2013 @04:36AM (#6025042)
That's a pain, but I think I could work around it by observing the human's use of the mouse for a while; there are some known actions (let's restrict to Windows), like clicking on start menu and some other stuff. By watching and calibrating, you could get a good idea what to do. You also might know a lot about the target environment; maybe they have totally standardized configurations including mouse speed, display size, etc.

The environment I'm thinking about is something like a SCADA control system for, say, a centrifuge cascade :)