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by pastelsky 662 days ago
One would’ve thought that after looking at modern day computers that being able to run a wire through two computers being able to transfer data quickly, reliably, easily would be a 101 feature these boxes offer.

It’s 2024 and it doesn’t really work!
3 comments
ssl-3 662 days ago
It used to work for some applications.

Back in the day, one could connect a bog-standard FireWire (IEEE 1394) cable betwixt a pair of Windows boxes, and it would create a (quite fast for the time) network for them to talk on.

Addressing was automatic with RFC 3927, and names just worked too.

After that, any appropriately-shared things on one machine would be accessible on the other.

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stephenr 662 days ago
This exact functionality works out of the box with macOS and a thunderbolt cable (I believe going back to TB1, but I've only tested with TB3).

Does Windows not auto-provision thunderbolt networking automatically?

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baq 662 days ago
OTOH corporate security gets paged whenever you plug something that isn’t a power supply or a monitor into the corporate box, up to and including an Ethernet cable.
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elric 662 days ago
I've seen banks disable USB ports by means of hot glue.

Hardware attacks are super hard to defend against. Depending on your threat model, drastic measures might be warranted. Anything with a USB plug can be a keyboard with an attack payload (e.g. Rubber Ducky). And if you think you can whitelist devices based on USB class or some identifier, you're wrong as they can be spoofed. Heck, there are "USB C cables" that are really attack payload delivery systems (e.g. O.MG Cable).

It's a scary world out there. Stay safe.

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transpute 662 days ago
Banks could ask known-good keyboard vendors to implement PKI auth. Intel has a spec for PCIe device authentication, based on USB-C authentication, https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...
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tiberious726 661 days ago
Like this: https://www.cherryamericas.com/secure-board-1-0
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transpute 661 days ago
Fantastic, thanks for the pointer!
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elric 661 days ago
I hadn't heard of either PCIe auth or USB-C auth. Thanks for sending me down that rabbit hole!
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zokier 662 days ago
USB4 networking is supported by Windows and Linux, and afaik macOS too in some form.

> It’s 2024 and it doesn’t really work!

have you actually tried it?

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