Sunday, December 7, 2014

USBOTG a quick view of options

The universal  USB adapter that plugs into a USB mini type B plug offers you some great advantages. It's known as a USBOTG ( USB On-The-Go )

You can attach a common  USB thumb-drives for quick access or backup for files. Great if your in a pinch, and need to move files between a Laptop and Tablet and you have no internet or bluetooth is  just plain to slow.




Remember that the filesystem-type must be supported in the Android OS kermel ( linux ). So don't try to  mount a  Apple or Encrypt FS to your Andorid tablet.

You can use the General > Storage tab for monitoring the device size and to validate androids see the  unit


or just use cli to see the mount point


Another option, if your bluetooth key board is not charged-up or you have no bluetooth keyboard. You can attach a  USB keyboard with easy to  your tablet. Here's my  "rollup" style keyboard attach to a Galaxy Pro.




NOTE: This option is much cheaper than most Bluetooth keyboards imho ( USBOTG +  USB-keyboard ). You could buy this setup for under 35.00 usd.


You can even use your USB-2-Serial adapter for configuring a cisco, juniper, fortinet or other  devices that  has serial access. A few serial tool apps are available in the google playstore YMMV on what ones work on your Android device

Lastly, a generic USB-ethernet adapters should work if the kernel recognize the brand. So a tablet could easily be able to  connect to a LAN for wired access. This also open up the possibilities for forensic gathering, hacking,  vulnerability testing from a tablet & to both wired and wireless devices.
https://www.blackhat.com/us-14/training/android-application-hacking-pentesting-mobile-apps.html

note: I was not as successful with using  most Samsung Phones and the usb2otg on androidOS version less than 4.4.2 and specially with the keyboard. Also don't try to hook up a ext-cdrom or ext-hdd to your Android Devices unless these devices use an "externally" power source.

Also my Nexus10 tablet fail to see anything on the USBOTG, which I found very strange and disappointing


Ken Felix
NSE ( Network Security Expert) and Route/Switching Engineer
kfelix  -----a----t---- socpuppets ---dot---com
   ^      ^
=(  +  - )=
       o 
      /  \

No comments:

Post a Comment