This is an interesting statement; I'm not sure how you can substantiate it -- I will not be able to evaluate the impact of the vulnerabilities until everything

This is an interesting statement; I'm not sure how you can substantiate it -- I will not be able to evaluate the impact of the vulnerabilities until everything is published after the Black Hat presentation next week. I looked to see if USB could 'do' DMA (similar to i1394) and the general consensus seemed to be that it was in the hands of drivers several layers below what was normally accessible to device developers - so unlikely but perhaps possible if there was an exploit. (It sounds like all DMA by the USB device would have to go through driver software on the computer, instead of direct memory access as is possible with firewire.) http://www.osronline.com/showthread.cfm?link=243802 http://www.osronline.com/showthread.cfm?link=243802 This all sounds similar to how 3d graphics drivers are a new security frontier as web browsers rush to support arbitrary shaders: any usb device can claim to be something with a 'ships-with-the-OS' exploitable driver (eg. a 10-year-old usb network adapter) and then pop the exploit to run arbitrary code with device driver level access. The solution will require sandboxing device drivers (in user-space or with virtualization) and will probably affect performance to such a degree that it will have to support opt-out.