The USB condom prevents your phone from picking up diseases from strange charging ports
Mobile devices are becoming a bigger part of our everyday lives, but the battery life often falls short of expectations. This has led many people to see an open charging portas an oasis in the desert. Free power? What could go wrong? Well, for a start, the power receptacle on a smartphone is also a data transfer port, so there’s at least some risk of your bits being snatched. This is called juice-jacking, but now there’s a handy prophylactic defense — the USB condom.
This is almost certainly not the product you envision when hearing the name. The USB condom is a circuit board that plugs into your phone’s USB port and is intended to stop any and all data transfers. With the USB condom between your device and the anonymous plug, you can supposedly plug in with peace of mind.
The USB condom is a dongle that works by sitting between the phone and power source to control which pins are actually connected to the random charging port. Take a glance at the connector of the nearest USB cable. You’ll see that it’s not just one monolithic connector, but a series of four pins. There are two pins for data, one for power, and one for ground. The USB condom simply routes the power pins, but blocks the data pins.
The device is not yet available for purchase, but it will be at some point next week. All we have to go on is a simple board diagram. It will be a stripped down component — maybe even a naked board, but it should be complete and functional as delivered. Yes, it will be another thing to carry around, but anyone paranoid about data security will be happy to have one.
Security researchers have been speculating for years that a charging kiosk could be used to transmit malware to phones, or even to suck data right off of the device. In many cases this may require an exploit to bypass basic security measures built into the phone, but some users have rooted or jailbroken devices which necessarily reduce the level of system protection.
In the wrong hands, the data from your phone is more valuable than the phone itself, so there is plenty of motivation for the bad guys to pursue juice-jacking. May the gods of USB have mercy on your data if you plug into a public USB port within 50 miles of the annualDefCon security conference in Las Vegas. This is a place where using public WiFi or ATMs is extremely risky. If there is anywhere juice-jacking is likely to occur, it’s there.
If the makers of the USB condom have any sense, they’ll set up shop at next year’s DefCon and make a boatload of cash selling their smartphone prophylactics. It will come in both mini and micro USB flavors. There is no price listed on the USB condom’s page yet, but can you really put a price on that kind of peace of mind?
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