> The O.MG Cable is a hand made USB cable with an advanced implant hidden inside. It is designed to allow your Red Team to emulate attack scenarios of sophisticated adversaries. Until now, a cable like this would cost $20,000 (ex: COTTONMOUTH-I). These cables will allow you to test new detection opportunities for your defense teams. They are also extremely impactful tools for teaching and training. Thanks to continual firmware updates, the resulting power, flexibility, and ease of use have made the O.MG Cable a favorite.
You'd need a license to export to most countries and show that you have controls in place that they are not sent to countries/companies/people on a blacklist/watchlist.
This is true for anything cybersecurity related and more strict for "intrusion" tooling.
I believe their point was that if it is small enough to place a display it would be small enough to put a malicious chip inside.
Then again, this person discovered these cables this year and they've been out for awhile. And the OMG cable has been out for a few years now, which does exactly what they are afraid of. Which of course could be done by state actors for much longer.
This reminds me of the time when I held a cookout in my backyard and one of the guests came in through the supposedly locked back door. I realized that my lock was broken as the bolt didn't engage, and hadn't for years.
I haven't heard of cell modems in particular, but I've used O.MG cables (described and sold here: https://shop.hak5.org/products/omg-cable; I am unaffiliated with either Hak5 or the team behind O.MG cables) which can create an ad-hoc Wi-Fi network for management/C2 reasons.
It's actually really easy to use (and almost scary, coming from never having used one of these).
They are quite pricey, but way less so than older cables used by security and jailbreak researchers in years past, which would run into the five figures.
Someone selling $200 cables for $2 just to spy on people reminds me of those stories of people supposedly giving out $10 pot lollipops to random children on Halloween
You're not going to sell them for $2 to random people on the street. You're going to sneakily replace the charging cord of some targeted $BIGCORP employee working in a Starbucks.
I'm all for some privacy protections, but doesn't 2-party consent cover that particular use case already? In CA, it swings a bit far the other way, and if you have a hidden mic recording a business lying through their teeth with the intent to defraud you, you might have a little wiggle room, but the recording is likely to be thrown out of any civil actions (and some criminal actions).
Don't you have to be party to the conversation to be 1-party? Should still be illegal to record one you're not a part of. (if such laws even apply in person rather than just over phones)
Good thing the FCC doesn't regulate the visible spectrum. (We are assuming these malicious people also face the wrath of the FCC but somehow not the CFAA... right? :P)
I had one of these and quite liked it. Then one day I plugged my phone in before bed as a million times before and the cable display popped and started emitting smoke.
Chargers, cables, batteries - you literally get what you pay for. In this category, the ultimate risk is nothing less than burning down whole house. I ain't rich enough for that cheap crapware. Anker it is for me.
For cables, I usually go for TrippLite. I have some Anker power banks and chargers and they work well, but a few cables from them just stopped working after a while.
This is news to me and doesn't confirm my own experience. Ie their pretty basic 65W wall charger is much better than 65W usb-c chargers from both HP and Dell they give to their laptops - much smaller and doesn't heat up at all with full day work from it, plastics are really solid so whole device just oozes quality, compared to properly cheap stuff from say aliexpress claiming the same.
Their 20,000 mah battery charger works exactly as advertised, has exactly the charge we expect, keeps working few years after purchase just as new.
So, to end suspense - what are actually high end manufacturer(s) in this area? I don't mean gucci-style appearance or some useless branding inflating the price, I mean actual internals.
I don’t closely follow the space, but Anker has always seemed like reasonable quality at a reasonable price. Maybe I’m easily marketed to or something. But I’ve had quite a few adapters and cables and such from them and have never had an issue.
Alternatively that means they sell cheap chinese crap at such a markup that they can easily afford to just replace the ones that break. Basically customer QA
Just wondering, do you know of a better alternative? I've pretty much only bought Anker recently because they haven't failed me yet. Trying to determine what is quality online now is very difficult.
I recorded a cell phone vide where I used a USB cable tester to show their cable was wired 1-8, 2-7, 3-6, 4-5, 5-4, 6-3, 7-2, 8-1 instead of straight-through. I also showed another cable testing correctly.
I showed that when the SmartQ q7 tablet computer was plugged into my PC's USB port using the cable my PC threw a warning about excess power drain, but when another cable was used, it did not throw an error. I proved that by recording a cell phone video.
I might have also used a USB power meter but I do not remember.
Due to the way the standards for power have gone there is substantial need for owning such a cable! Maybe when everything is USB C PD compatible and tested and works then devices might just charge at the right wattage as they are specified to. Alas so far I have had a lot of devices that refused to charge at anything higher than 7 watts despite USB C on both ends and a modern GAN 100W charger. The power standards for USB are a complete mess.
> Due to the way the standards for power have gone there is substantial need for owning such a cable!
More than this everybody (and in particular; "the common non-tech person") needs a powerful and feature rich "USB Power Meter". This and knowledge of a couple of equations (eg. P=IV) goes a long way in understanding how good a charger/battery is, how to prevent overheating problems during charging, whether fastcharging can be used and at what capability or not etc.
This is a great and powerful USB power meter which is highly recommended. Make sure that you read and keep the manual handy since there are so many functions (and heed the warnings listed there). There are other cheaper versions/clones of this on Aliexpress which may also be good.
Another great gadget (no USB-C though) is "PortaPow Premium USB + DC Power Monitor/Multimeter/DC Ammeter" which is a neat little device - https://lygte-info.dk/review/USBmeter%20Portapow%20UK.html Checkout the reviews on Amazon too for further details.
I have this one, it was great for debugging an annoying transient during power-on which some combinations of hardware with caps on the edge of tolerance had! In the field too!
Yea I got one of these and found it very useful. So easy to get a USB cable that is secretly not to spec or otherwise dysfunctional and is making things charge slow. (Most common: 5W when it should be ~20W.)
They can be handy. One situation where it saved the day - my friend has a partially broken USB-C port on their phone that only charges when the cable is just right. The battery had died so there was no way to see if it was charging or not. Plugged in a USB-C inline power meter and we moved the cable around until the meter showed current, then we carefully set it down so it would finish charging. :)
I've had issues with USB devices drawing more current then the port could put out. Without a power meter, it looks like the device just doesn't work (although the Linux kernel logs typically show a device disconnect event).
With the meter, you can see a current peak up to a nice round value, followed by a voltage drop. The low refresh rate makes it not nearly as clear as with an oscilloscope, but once you know what to look for, it is easy enough to pick up. (And if you really want to, you can get one with a breakout to connect scope probes).
If this is an issue you run into often, I'd also suggest a usb variable load tester to check exactly how much current a port will output.
Suppose you plugged in your Phone/Tablet and it is not charging or charging very slowly etc. Problems might be;
1) The battery is dead and cannot be charged.
2) The cable is a non-charging one or internally damaged/dead or non-fastcharging or with limited fastcharging capability.
3) The charger is not capable enough to supply the max current that the device can use to charge itself.
To troubleshoot the problem, first check the Voltage/Current specs for your device, make sure that the charger plug/battery can provide the same voltage but same or higher amount of current. Then use a USB power meter to see what is actually being drawn (or not) to figure out where and what the problem might be. One key point to note is that for fastcharging all the links in the chain i.e. charger, cable and device should support it.
I have a gaming laptop for which noise and heat are directly correlated with power draw, but not always so obviously correlated with graphics settings, and having a power readout on the cable let me see what different low vs medium shadows had, etc.
One thing you can do is check battery health by observing the charging process with a power meter that supports charge counting.
Another use case was when the battery in my laptop was completely empty, which made it switch to some emergency charging mode that didn't like the normally fine USB-C power supply. I found that it did accept charge from an external battery, so I charged it using that for a while until it booted.
I have a cheap device that costs about 2€ on AliExpress. It is not a cable but a little box.
I don't remember why I got the older one, but the USB-C one was mostly just curiosity - I'd heard that wireless charging was inefficient compared to wired charging and wanted to see how much.
Current USB-C cables that connect to my docking station have a rigid connector end that puts mechanical stress on my laptop's port. I have the habit of moving my laptop around on my desk, and that connector end is a lever that pulls it out of the port.
Worse, it physically wore out one of the ports where it became almost unusable (replacing requires an entire new board).
Let's not put more stuff on these cables so they don't act more like like pliers instead of actual cables.
The only thing which comes to mind is the mandatory "Billboard Class" support for USB-C adapters, which allows them to inform the device they're attached to that negotiation has failed. But that's not really anything physical on the adapter itself, it's essentially a super-simple read-only micro flashdrive.
What I like for USB-C cables is not only a tester that tests how much power it can transmit but also what data rates. I wish I could get a device where I could plug in all my cables and it would rate them for me. Such a device probably exists and it probably costs thousands of dollars.
You might be able to get partway there by setting up thunderbolt networking between two endpoints. The caveat is that USB 4.x is still new enough it may require a significant time sink to get working at ~40Gbps et al, so your testing wouldn't be able to scale that high. But you can go to 10Gbps without too much effort: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39003469
USB is quite the rabbithole, with a lot of functionality often hidden: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39470381 - my takeaway from this is that "the PHY in the controller is 99% of the SERDES you wish you had, you just have to figure out how to make it cooperate"
The chipsets found attached to ARM devices and SoCs etc may be easier to poke around at, but they are likely to either be expensive or just USB 3.0. :)
Then there are devices like the FNB58 and the Power-Z KM003C that interrogate the controller chip in the cable and tell what charging protocols the cable supports, and also measure practical charging voltage and current (and you can acid test chargers using USB charger dummy loads). These devices don't test the cable's speed though. (On that note, https://old.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/1b5wgc6/how_t... - that subreddit may also be interesting)
Would plugging in your fastest external SSD and then using a hard drive read/write tester achieve some of the same ends? I've done that before with Blackmagic's disk speed test app and found it useful
I have a couple of these, one's in my laptop case, the other off a charger I carry everywhere. No less durable than a regular cable for a couple of years so far.
These power meter cables have been out for a couple years, but it's only recently that manufacturers have caught on that previously the display would be upside down for most(?) people (or 100% of people who are me, anyway) when plugged in on the left side of the machine. Which I find hilarious, because the pictures in the AliExpress listings always showed the cable plugged in on the left, display upside down, like it was meant to be that way.
My ThinkPad only has left USB-C, my M1 Air only has left USB-C, and I'm accustomed to left power from years of MacBooks.
I own this cable. You literally put the cable in the left side at an orientation that has the display facing upwards. I feel like I'm missing something!
It's bidirectional so you can just twist the cable so the display is facing up..
Looks like two definitions of up are being discussed..
- upside down the display is pointing towards the table (useless) - which you have a solution for
- upside down, the display is visible, but the text is rotated 180° (as people would say when a calculator is upside down) - you cannot twist your way out of this except facing the computer away from you (99=66, 70=0L 5537=LESS etc)
I can read the numbers upside down, I just don't want to and I find it silly that these manufacturers took several years to notice and decide to fix a basic fit-and-finish issue that probably affected 90% of their customer base. Like, how on Earth was this not caught during the prototype phase?
These have been on the market for years. I have a bunch of them.
They are a bad gimic in every way.
They generate heat. They waste power. They create light pollution. They are distracting. Their measurement capabilities are often very limited or mediocre or don't update quickly. And finally they often burn out and stop working anyway.
If you want a USB power meter, buy one for $10 or less.
Marginal. A laptop display uses 1000x power and heat than these LCDs. Turning your brightness down for a few seconds saves the same amount.
> They create light pollution. They are distracting.
Personal preference, but for me it is no more distracting than the battery percentage icon next to my taskbar clock.
> Their measurement capabilities are often very limited or mediocre or don't update quickly.
The chip used in all the Aliexpress cables updates multiple times a second and is in line with my standalone power meter.
> And finally they often burn out and stop working anyway.
I'm using these as my daily drivers for all my USB C devices for over a year, and haven't had to replace them. Gave them as stocking stuffers to the family last Christmas and have heard no complaints.
Couple years ago I have ordered a charger from ali, and similar cable was added “as a gift”. Pretty neat to quickly identify charging issues with various devices.
I hope it stops there and we will have no cables standard with giving a tune when connected and disconnected, perhaps beeping at each 100M transferred or such. Too many gadgets and appliences want to be in the center of our attention and notifying us about all more or less significant actions of their life - like people on Facebook - by giving sound, flashing, sending messages to the phone and my wife's email and whatnot. I prefer my cables staying in the attention background by doing their job.
I went through two of these kind of USB-C cables bought from Amazon. They both broke within a matter of months. I'd wait until a reputable brand sells them.
So shall we expect the USB protocol to go encrypted? The USB committee (I don't know their actual name) can act as a root CA.
It doesn't take a lot of compute to encrypt at my typing rate. I'd expect high transfer rate devices to probably already have the hardware (e.g everyone at rest).
It's not just a draft, the data required for a lot of this is already being included in cables currently being sold. I'm not aware of it actually being used, though.
Useful for lots of things - my earbuds have a really vague charging light, but if it says 0.00w I know it's done. I have a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller with a dodgy connection too, and it lets me know it's actually charging.
Any good ones that would essentially replace a USB load tester? I'm thinking applications where I want to monitor power draw from a battery pack to say: a phone, or power being produced from a small solar panel (small, off the grid stuff)
I've been using the cheapest aliexpress cable ($1.79 for "100W" model) for a few month, and it seems to work fine for 40W charging of my laptop. The display is extremely useful, as the charge light is hard to see when the laptop is in the bag.
The quotes made me laugh. So true. I can just imagine talking with a friend and they use air-quotes to describe the technical specs of any random item from AliExpress. Well said!
Well... Data are useful if we can collect and process them automatically, a display means you can read instantaneously (essentially useless 99% of the time) but not store and analyze.
Some instantaneous data are useful, for instance before going out in the morning a quick look at the thermometer might be useful. Many others are not. For me a more expensive cable just to have a display on it is useless, eventually collected consumption data per device and makes a nice Grafana dashboard of them might be useful or just wasted resources, but at least they go on a flexible machine I already own so it's not an extra hw costs.
"That’s when I found out that there exist cables that have little screens on them that show the power consumption of the connected device."
Useful to get an idea how much your USB light draws and to check if your phone is really fast charging. I'd be careful with the numbers when the USB drives a more complicated load. Measuring the true power consumption of a microcontroller is surprisingly hard.
Sure the load can be very spiky and you have to sample fast enough to accurately integrate them. but that's doable given sufficient caps. Of course you'd end up with some filtered average instead of the instantaneous power, but that would be no good for a text display anyway.
When your range is from nano amps during sleep to spikes of several tens of amps you will not find a voltmeter with a range big enough to work with a single shunt. You need several shunts and switch between them very fast. That's what devices like the Joulscope do and why they are expensive.
Fun fact. Any USB-C cable that needs to handle higher wattage than 5V@3A has circuitry that talks on the CC line to let the source know it’s not going to melt.
The threshold is higher than that. Passive USB-C cables can do up to 20V @ 3A (60W). Electronically marked cables are only required for higher power profiles.
The USB-IF publishes a list of member companies[1]; purchase products from these qualified manufacturers, and perhaps more importantly, from authorized distributors.
This is a good enough "policy control" for the average consumer.
Erm. I fail to see how this moves the needle unless usb-if is doing extreme firmware level source analysis and deterministic compiles and checking them against shipped firmware. Which I doubt is happening, with every atom in my body.
It's a policy control suggestion that's both low effort and immediately actionable by the typical tech-literate types sleuthing these channels.
When baseline consumer behavior is sort-by-price-low-to-high and select the cheapest item from random pop-up white label chinesium third-party vendor on Amazon, exercising an ounce of supply chain due diligence where none previously existed can go a long way.
To be sure, if you think you can economically defend against a coordinated supply chain attack by a speculative adversary willing to pony up real capital operating an otherwise legitimate facade for years building market goodwill only to burn it all down in one shot against a single worthwhile target...well, I've got a bridge to sell you.
USB testers are cheaper now, I'd advise anyone to buy one preemptively.
It's nice to one-off check a new cable to know what it can be used for, with the additional benefit of seeing the power curves for the higher models (e.g. see a charger's power output drastically drop down as it overheats)
I'm using a super cheap Ali-express one I checked against well know and stable brands of cable/chargers (e.g. Apple and Anker's power bricks and cables).
Otherwise AVHzY is I think the recommended brand, with two levels or pricing depending if you want external output.
And realize that if you're distrustful of the cable, you should be even more distrustful of that gadget which has even more space to add malicious parts and you're still unable to check it.
The normal PortaPow tells the device that it's a charger.
The extra paranoid version with no components on the board will often limit charging, it depends on how the device treats a complete lack of data pins.
Not exactly. You now have to trust one entity instead of many, and it's an extremely small chip that can't do much, and the hack would have to be built in at purchase time, and the hack would have to take over your phone to exfiltrate.
But if you're worried then get one that has a resistor and only a resistor.
It depends on what kind of attack you're trying to block.
If you want to block attacks that use the external data pins, then a USB condom will keep you safe. Regardless of whether it has a chip in it.
If you want to block standalone attacks from a malicious cable, then a USB condom wasn't going to help in the first place. For standalone attacks in particular, the risk from a chip-having condom is similar to the risk from a cable, but a cable can use bigger and scarier chips than the one in the PortaPow.
In terms of the risk of a “malicious chip”, that has nothing to do with the display or USB-C. Any cable could have a malicious chip in it at this point. USB-C cables require some chips to function so even if you take it apart you won’t know for sure what its little chips are doing. Good luck out there!
I've used some by an Aliexpress brand called Soopii for some time now. I broke one myself, the rest are still going strong after ~2 years, and power testing with an actual USB C tester, they're quite accurate.
Does usb4 require any circuitry in the cable? I'd expect a 20-odd connector cable to be available for $7 (direct from china) pretty easily. I haven't bought many, but the best type C cables (usb3) I ever bought were €2.12 each.
I have both and I find the cable just as useful. Also, if for some reason you don't want it there, for example it is a bit bright for a nightstand, you can run it in reverse and it stays off.
> The O.MG Cable is a hand made USB cable with an advanced implant hidden inside. It is designed to allow your Red Team to emulate attack scenarios of sophisticated adversaries. Until now, a cable like this would cost $20,000 (ex: COTTONMOUTH-I). These cables will allow you to test new detection opportunities for your defense teams. They are also extremely impactful tools for teaching and training. Thanks to continual firmware updates, the resulting power, flexibility, and ease of use have made the O.MG Cable a favorite.