type-safely

Cambridge Computer Science Tripos -- Part II

⚠️ This project includes novel cryptographic primitive implementations and protocols that have not been audited. Use at your peril.

Hardware USB keyloggers and programmable USB keystroke injection tools are widely available, inexpensive, and small enough to be easily concealable. Such devices can even be embedded inside a standard-size USB connector, making their detection nearly impossible. These devices allow the interception of sensitive details and the spoofing of keyboard input, so the threats to computer users can range from theft of sensitive information to the complete compromise of their computer.

This project aims to mitigate these threats by bringing the guarantees of confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and authorisation---provided by protocols such as TLS and Bluetooth---to communication with USB keyboards. This will be achieved by designing and implementing a new protocol, on top of the USB stack, for communication with USB keyboards.

In order to give a reasonable confidence in the security properties of the new protocol, the core of the cryptographic protocol will be based upon an existing, well-studied one, such as Bluetooth's \textit{Simple Secure Pairing}. The implementation will be made from scratch, and will consist of both software for the microcontroller inside the keyboards, and host-side drivers and keyboard management software for Ubuntu Linux.

More information can be found in my dissertation.

I’d like to thank my supervisor and Director of Studies, Prof Frank Stajano, for all his support and guidance throughout the project, and Dr Markus Kuhn for proposing this project.

Building

Firmware

Make sure to have gcc-arm-none-eabi and GNU make installed.

cd type-safely-firmware
# Pull in libopencm3
git submodule init
git submodule update
# Run make on the libopencm3 directory
make -j8 -C ./libopencm3
# Make the project itself
make PLATFORM=STM32F4_1BITSY -j8

Edit: apply the fix at libopencm3/libopencm3#794 to the libopencm3 dir before makeing it

C++ Protocol test

Make sure to have CMake, libusb-1.0.0-dev, and libssl-dev installed.

cd common/protobuf_test_cpp
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j8
./proto_test_cpp

Host daemon

Similar to the C++ Protocol test. Requires Qt to be installed!

cd type-safely-daemon
mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/Users/Harry/Qt5.12.0/5.12.0/clang_64/lib/cmake ..
make -j8
./typesafely_daemon

Note that you'll have to adjust CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH to match your installation directory.

Extra steps:

# [Linux only] Allow root to display windows on X
xhost +SI:localuser:root

# Make the LTK storage directory
sudo mkdir /etc/typesafely
sudo chmod -R 700 /etc/typesafely