"If you want to try it, be aware that it requires Intel Pentium 166MHz or above."
Made me laugh. Fun article, also really love the genre of "bored smart person goes too deep on something that the end result is obvious by common sense but proving it requires surprising amount of ingenuity and scrappiness"
All USB-to-Ethernet adapters are pretty evil in my experience. Always terrible performance, often slower than WiFi.
Related:
Cheap rj45 ethernet to USB adapter contains malware
RJ45 nazi here: these should be called 8P8C
I’ll show myself out
TIL. After maybe 25 years of using this connector, I've never heard it called 8P8C. I knew Ethernet has used other physical layers including coax, which I used to run between Amigas way back in the day. But, today I finally learned about 8P8C.
On the general topic of USB to 1000BASE-T (and now 2.5 GBaseT) dongles, for people who care about performance, it's good to know about the distinction between those that are USB devices and those that are PCI-Express devices.
Basically, what do you get if you hotplug it into a laptop running a current linux kernel and do "sudo lsusb -v" vs "sudo lspci -v"?
The ones that are native PCIE devices offer much better performance, up to 2.5 GBASET line rate, and will communicate with the host over the implementation of thunderbolt over USB.
The ones that are USB only might work okay, but there's a reason they're cheap.
Of course a cheaper laptop also won't have any implementation of thunderbolt on it, so that's something to consider as well.
Could you elaborate on why the USB ones are worse?
Per Wikipedia, USB 3.0 (from 2008) can reach 5 Gbit/s, so (naively?) one would expect them to reach 2.5 GbE line rate easily, right?
TLDR: it is not "evil"
So many wtf here. If anything this proves it is backdoored network card
1) downloading Windows exe files from Chinese forums
2) the USB storage provided by network card can still contain malware,
3) or can be accidentally booted from
4) it has universal USB controller, so can become any HID device: keyboard, mouse...
It proves it might be possible to backdoor it. Maybe.
I don't know of any modern systems that will execute anything on a newly inserted drive, nor boot from an external drive in the default configuration.
So we are missing a couple of things. First, a vulnerability in the OS/system. Second, an implementation of that vulnerability in a device like this.
Should this design be phased out? Perhaps. There is relatively little difference between not populating the flash memory part of the board and a proper network-only implementation.
Don't forget `I was ready to head over to the Dark Web (amazon.com) and purchase one of the dongles just to dump the contents of the memory chip.`
Totally agree.
And a great example that truth is complicated, expensive and uncomfortable. It's much easier to postulate an evil nation-state entity with a bad plan (without evidence) than to dig through the thicket of this article. It's much cheaper as well, certainly in terms of time and knowhow. And it's also much more comfortable to claim you're the victim and have uncovered a conspiracy, rather than realize this was just the result of the patchwork typical of engineering.
Kudos to the author.