Unintentional use of USB Channels and Protection

Abstract

Protecting an organization against the information leakage is a big task, especially when the attacker is an insider. This paper covers an insider attack based on Unintentional use of USB channels. Endpoint Protections are available to guard against the leakage of information over USB Mass Storage and USB Printer interfaces but they fail to keep watch on flow of data over USB Human Interface Devices such as USB speaker, USB keyboard and USB mouse etc. Operating system allows USB device to identify itself as any USB device. To exploit this vulnerability a Hardware Trojan horse device is developed which can identify itself as USB audio device or USB Keyboard device and make Unintentional use of USB channels to steal the data. This paper also gives a possible protection scheme to detect and block the stealing of data over Unintended USB Channels.