Killing Your Device via Your USB Port.

The USB killer is a testing device that has been marketed as having been designed to test the limits of the surge protection circuitry of electronics. The device can 'fry' an electronic device in a fraction of a second. The aim of this research is to identify to what extent the data that is stored on the device can be destroyed when utilising the USB Killer 2.0 since it could potentially become the weapon of a malicious user with access to a device with an active USB port. The authors conducted a series of experiments utilising the USB killer in different hardware configurations. The paper introduces the USB protocol and discusses the functionality of the USB killer before outlining the experiment and presenting the results of the study.