What if I stored data in my mouse
28 points by rnb37
28 points by rnb37
I suppose it's not quite as interesting as hacking around HID++, but Kinesis keyboards have a flash memory that you can access by typing a key sequence (prgrm +F1). I thought it was pretty clever when I learned about it.
It's only 4Mb, and it's slow, but it has a directory with the user manual as a PDF; a directory with some text configuration files that you can edit, save and use another keyboard shortcut to reload; a directory that you can copy/paste or drag/drop firmware updates into, and a Windows installer.exe for their Windows app to edit the keyboard shortcuts. And it's all documented in the user manul - including the config file format.
On mine there was about 1.6 Mb of free space available, so I copied my .emacs config there.
Yeah, I used to do the same thing before I bought my second Kinesis Pro (so I wouldn't have to lug it) ...
20-25 years ago there was some proof-of-concept malware for Apple keyboards that was quite fun. The keyboards had, as I recall, 128 KiB of flash for the firmware, but the firmware was about 66 KiB (slightly too big for a smaller flash chip). The demo malware included a key logger that stored every keypress to the flash and a minimal USB mass storage host-mode driver, so when you plugged in a USB flash drive with the right name it would dump the contents of the keylogger. The idea was that you could flash every keyboard in an office with this malware and then bribe the cleaning staff to plug in your flash drive to the USB ports on the back of the keyboard ever night as they went past. You’d get a complete dump of every keypress made in the office.
I don’t know of any cases of something like this being deployed in a real environment.