A file system for safely interacting with untrusted USB flash drives

This paper introduces RBFuse, a system for interacting with USB flash drives safely in commodity OSes while bypassing the complex and bug-prone USB stack on the host. RBFuse prevents attacks in which malicious USB flash drives exploit low-level USB driver vulnerabilities to compromise the host machine. The simple idea behind RBFuse is to remap the USB stack to a virtual machine and export the flash drive’s file system as a mountable virtual file system. The result of this decomposition is that the host can access all the files in the flash drive without speaking USB. This is beneficial from a security standpoint, since the VFS interface is small, has well-defined semantics, and can be formally verified. RBFuse requires no hardware modifications and introduces low overhead.