I’d like to know what happens.
In: Technology
A USB port is just a series of wires in specific positions that connect two ends. If you were to connect something that looks like a USB plug into it, but send really high voltage, the electronics on the other end aren’t built to handle it, and can burn out rather quickly.
It’s really easy to build actually. All you need are capacitors and wire it so that it charges on the power lines and discharges on the tx rx lines.
The capacitors can be charged with USB charger that doesn’t have data connected. Then when you plug in the USB killer to a device it discharges all the capacitors into the target device
USB ports provide both power and data wires. Power only provides 5 volts, but it’s workable.
The USB killer has a voltage converter that converts 5 volts to something WAY higher… like a few hundred volts. It pulls the 5 volts from the port to charge up its power storage… and when it reaches that high voltage, it sends that power down the data wires. Repeat as long as it keeps getting power.
The data wires are meant to use 0 to ~3.3 volts for the 0 and 1 binary signals, and will go right into a small chip. It is not meant to withstand hundreds of volts and will quickly, if not instantly, kill it. You now have a completely dead chip on the circuit board of your… whatever it is. PC, laptop, television…. At a minimum, that USB port doesn’t work any more.
Some systems provide a single chip that can do USB, CPU, some RAM and storage. Maybe more, maybe less… They’re called a System On A Chip. It’s very nice for circuit board manufacturers to have all the basics of a computer in one chip on the board, but it means a USB killer might destroy them all at once. Now the thing doesn’t work at all.
And these are not parts easily swapped out.
it uses USB power to charge a small battery and once its fully powered up it sends thousands of volt to a 3V databus
controller says poof
Question: what if the usb killer was plugged into a usb hub, would that provide any protection?
Imagine you have a garden hose, with which you can spray Alice or Bob, resulting in different actions being carried out, depending on the order and combination. Now, as the do-no-gooder you are, you decide to instead use the hose to fill a fire-fighting plane and waterbomb the poor souls. Sure, it took some time to fill that big ass plane with your tiny hose, but they aren’t getting up after that…
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