USB Enumeration Fingerprint

Rich Gates June 16, 2020 Security

Does the title of this article even make sense? Yes, but not to most.

USB enumeration is the process a host computer goes through to identify the type of USB device connected and what the operating system should do with the newly detected device.

Fingerprint would simply imply the different steps a computer operating system goes through when determine the USB device type.

For 99.7% of the people who visit this site, this information doesn’t matter, but for others it does. The security industry would be the prime candidate for wanting this information. If a security expert, team or programmer knows the exact steps an operating system goes through to mount a USB device, it will help them keep programs secure.

Andrea Barisani, a security expert based out of Italy, put together some open source code which compares the USB enumeration fingerprint for the MacOS, Windows and Linux. The open source code is available on Github.com (here).

This bit of code is probably valuable to software programmers who deal with USB flash drives and portable applications.