Fear My $50 Charger, For It Controls Your Android Phone's Keyboard
Take note: if I ever proposition you with some free mobile juice via a portable charger, don’t accept.
Over the last month, I’ve created chargers that try to brute force open Android phones by guessing the passcode. Then, with a handy bluetooth chip hidden inside, they let me control the compromised phone’s keyboard from my own Android.
My malevolent machinations were, almost entirely, a rip off of ideas of Seunghun Han, a security researcher at the National Security Research Institute in South Korea who showed off his own so-called ‘PowerShock’ device at the Hack In The Box conference in Amsterdam earlier this year. He’s now open sourced the software required to create a rogue charger on Github (the software can also be used to hack into non-Android machines via so-called “BadUSB” attacks). He also provided me with a guide and plenty of assistance on how to emulate his PowerShock.
