Re: Selectively disabling USB devices

[Neksus <neksus () gmail com>]

Pranav,

I am not aware of a free possibility (if you ever do, please let me
know) but there are many commercial software who can do this by using
the USB device ID to permit/deny the use.

It only works if the user is not an administrator although I assisted
a presentation by Verdasys (Digital Guardian) which claimed they could
bypass this issue by hooking in the kernel at boot time. I'm not a
Windows engineer so I can't confirm is this is real or bogus but the
presentation seemed satisfactory for me. Unfortunately, we haven't
opted for that product.

Instead we used a tool named Device Lock which can do the same thing.
We don't have a problem with users being administrator so this works
fine.

Please note that (as far as I know), Firewire doesn't have different
IDs per device so you can only do "disabled", "read" or "read write". 
USB provides much better managability.

(N)


> Is it possible to selectively disable USB devices? For instance, only mice and
> printers should work when connected to a USB port but flash drives, other mp3
> players etc should not work when connected to the same USB ports.