USB mass storage devices are some of the most common peripherals in use today. They number in the billions and have become the de-facto standard for offline data transfer. USB drives have also been implicated in malware propagation (BadBIOS) and targeted attacks (Stuxnet).
A USB write blocker may help to prevent some of these issues and allow researchers to examine the content of the attempted writes. USBProxy allows us to build an external write blocker using cheap and widely available hardware that will be undetectable by the host system.
Dominic Spill has been building packet sniffers and researching wireless security since 2007. He has been a security researcher and the lead developer for Ubertooth for the past two years while also working on Daisho, FCC.io and USBProxy.