brachiosaurusTIL for at last 15 years US government has been able to implant hardware into USB cables to turn them into hacking devices with wireless capability.
Bad_EngineeringYou can now buy one for yourself online. https://shop.hak5.org/products/omg-cable
Crazy that the USB-A housing is big enough for that. Makes me want to avoid anything that’s not C to C.
C-to-C is even worse because Usb-C requires a chip in the connector, and you never know what that chip is capable of. Usb-A would only have a chip in it if it’s been tampered with.
Yeah I was hoping the smaller form factor would make it difficult to fit in extra malicious hardware.
This was the smallest Bluetooth chip back in 2017. I can’t even imagine what else they can fit into the form factor of a USB-C plug nowadays.
Released last year, TI MSPM0C1104
The MSPM0C1104 is a 24 MHz Arm Cortex-M0+ based device with up to 16 KB of flash and 1 KB of SRAM. It has a 12-bit ADC with three channels, six GPIO pins, and typical communication interfaces like UART, SPI, and I²C. It is an ultra-low-power 32-bit MCU well suited for compact battery-powered designs.
There’s a USB-C option for the active end.