DEF CON 24 - Marc Newlin - MouseJack: Injecting Keystrokes into Wireless Mice
Channel: DEFCONConference
Date: 2016-08-27

What if your wireless mouse was an effective attack vector? Research reveals this to be the case for mice from Logitech, Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard, Gigabyte, and Amazon. Dubbed 'MouseJack', this class of security vulnerabilities allows keystroke injection into non-Bluetooth wireless mice. Imagine you are catching up on some work at the airport, and you reach into your laptop bag to pull out your phone charger. As you glance back at your screen, you see the tail end of an ASCII art progress bar followed by your shell history getting cleared.

Before you realize what has happened, an attacker has already installed malware on your laptop. Or maybe they just exfiltrated a git repository and your SSH keys. In the time it took you to plug in your phone, you got MouseJacked. The attacker is camped out at the other end of the terminal, equipped with a commodity USB radio dongle and a directional patch antenna hidden in a backpack, and boards her plane as soon as the deed is done. The reality of MouseJack is that an attacker can inject keystrokes into your wireless mouse dongle from over 200 meters away, at a rate of up to 7500 keystrokes per minute (one every 8ms). 

Most wireless keyboards encrypt the data going between the keyboard and computer in order to deter sniffing, but wireless mouse traffic is generally unencrypted. The result is that wireless mice and keyboards ship with USB dongles that can support both encrypted and unencrypted RF packets. A series of implementation flaws makes it possible for an attacker to inject keystrokes directly into a victim's USB dongle using easily accessible, cheap hardware, in most cases only requiring that the user has a wireless mouse. The majority of affected USB dongles are unpatchable, making it likely that vulnerable computers will be common in the wild for the foreseeable future. 

This talk will explain the research process that lead to the discovery of these vulnerabilities, covering specific tools and techniques. Results of the research will be detailed, including protocol behavior, packet formats, and technical specifics of each vulnerability. Additional vulnerabilities affecting 14 vendors are currently in disclosure, and will be revealed during this talk.

Marc is a security researcher and software engineer at Bastille Networks, where he focuses on RF/IoT threats present in enterprise environments. He has been hacking on software defined radios since 2013, when he competed as a finalist in the DARPA Spectrum Challenge. In 2011, he wrote software to reassemble shredded documents for the DARPA Shredder Challenge, finishing the competition in third place out of 9000 teams.

Twitter: @marcnewlin