About 13-14 years ago some parts of the US DoD resorted to hot glue gun filling all the usb ports on desktop PCs, except for the two ports required for the keyboard and mouse.
This was during the windows XP era when it seemed there were an endless number of security problems related to usb devices, no matter how good the group policy and registry settings pushed via active directory membership were.
My company stayed on NT4 until 2008 because it didn't have USB support. Network was fully locked down and any unknown MAC would cause an immediate search by IT.
They probably did. The sort of IT folks that would run a decade old OS are the same kind that would resort to this sort of security theater to "lock down" their network. Capturing MAC addresses off a device is pretty simple if you don't mind a little bit of connectivity loss during the process.
>About 13-14 years ago some parts of the US DoD resorted to hot glue gun filling all the usb ports on desktop PCs, except for the two ports required for the keyboard and mouse.
Here's a current story:
Someone ordered the wrong desk phones at your large company?
1.) Assemble your crew. Go to various departments and recruit non-technical people.
2.) Task them with disassembling 1000 desk phones.
Is the disassembly and reassembly just for more billable hours? Seems to me you could fill user-accessible USB ports with hot glue without it, same as a user could fill it with an unauthorized USB device.
It solves two problems: one is someone covertly or foolishly plugging in an untrusted USB device (which might be easily missed on, say, the back of a desktop) and it means that checking to make sure that only a keyboard or mouse are attached is as simple as putting tamper-evident seals on those cables.
Attempting to authenticate USB devices is a very hard problem — a sufficiently advanced attacker can spoof manufacturer and device IDs, even if you lock things down to prevent anything other than a keyboard or mouse it's possible to send keystrokes to open the wrong website, there's always a chance of an exploitable flaw in your USB stack, etc. — but anyone diligent can be paid to walk around every week checking to make sure that a seal is solid and the tamper-evident stickers have the same serial number as listed on the inventory. There is a real value in having things where the failure modes are obvious and intuitive.
The closest thing to a USB hub I've got is one of my external drives for my Mac Mini has a built in USB hub so I can plug stuff into that as well as directly into the computer. The last time I worried about such things was back when desktop computers only had one or two USB ports. Plus, in a DoD situation, I'd imagine that having your own USB hub plugged into a DoD computer would be the kind of thing that could put your job at risk. A friend who teaches at the Naval War College often laments the unusability of DoD IT because of the level of locking down, but any "Why don't you do X?" suggestions have a response of "I'd get fired."
The safeguard doesn't need to be perfect, it just has to be good enough.
If my experience with users holds true, they'll abandon the quest at the first obstacle and the USB will harmlessly sit in a desk drawer for the rest of time.
It doesn’t solve for an outsider or malicious employee getting access to a machine. What it does solve for is an employee plugging in a compromised usb device on accident since they probably won’t unplug there keyboard or mouse for it.
That's what my alma mater, the University of Waterloo, did for some of our labs when I attended. Then at some point something must have happened and they moved all the electronics into the PC case and only the wires of the mouse, keyboard, and monitor came out of these little openings.
Reminds me of my school when someone booted Ophcrack to recovered cached network passwords - they removed the CD drives. Given the machines didn't support booting from USB (IIRC), it wasn't a terrible solution.
This was during the windows XP era when it seemed there were an endless number of security problems related to usb devices, no matter how good the group policy and registry settings pushed via active directory membership were.