How can I change the embedded device name of a USB stick?

March 18, 2009 9:03 AM

How can I change the embedded device name of a USB stick?

I'm trying to make the usb device look like another usb device -
The symantic antivirus preloaded on my machine only allows USBs of a certain type to be opened by windows.

so i want to change the device name of a USB so it looks like the allowed USB type.

When I run a lsusb on my linux box i get the following back

Bus 001 Device 020: ID 04f2:b119 Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd

I want to rename it too the ID details shown below

Bus 001 Device 021: ID 08ec:204a M-Systems Flash Disk Pioneers TravelDrive

Is this possible?

posted by complience to computers & internet (8 comments total)

You could probably uninstall that device driver and reinstall it with the driver for the M-Systems Flash Disk; that driver should work fine.

But this seems like a spotty solution. At the very least, I'm not certain it would work; and I don't know of any other way to do this. Why can't you just either (a) set the option in Symantec to allow all USB drives, (b) disable Symantec temporarily while you use the USB drive, or (c) get an antivirus program that isn't silly about USB drives?
posted by koeselitz at 9:12 AM on March 18

It would be easier to replace symantec with one of the free AV solutions, which are reportedly more effective, like Avast.
posted by nomisxid at 9:13 AM on March 18

I'm not sure that lsusb actually reads any words off the device itself. Rather, the lsusb manpage lists a file (/var/lib/misc/usb.ids) that contains a mapping of vendor numbers to names.

I'm fairly sure that the numbers you would have to change are ROM.
posted by pwnguin at 10:38 AM on March 18

You almost certainly can't.

Don't know how lsusb works, but in general there are 2 ways USB devices are identified:

1. Vendor ID, Product ID numbers returned by the device in its device descriptor. These are always present and, as pwnguin says, are likely to be hard-coded in the device's firmware.

2. Vendor and product strings returned by the device in string descriptors. These are optional -- the device doesn't have to support any string descriptors. If they're present, again, likely to be hard-coded in the device.

The list pwnguin notes may be a fallback that lsusb uses to try to provide human-readable names for devices that do not themselves provide strings.

koeselitz's driver-swapping idea almost certainly won't work either -- the USB subsystem locates the appropriate driver for the device based on the information it provides, and you can't change that information. (Besides, pretty much all USB storage devices these days have no custom driver to install or uninstall -- they all use Windows' built-in mass storage driver.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:05 AM on March 18

one of the free AV solutions, which are reportedly more effective

This isn't true, in my experience. SAV doesn't catch everything, but the free ones are laughably bad.
posted by oaf at 11:52 AM on March 18

The USB Device/Vendor IDs can be changed in at least some circumstances. When I installed XBMC on my xbox, I soldered up an imitation Action Replay using an xbox controller, USB cable, and and old Kingston USB thumb drive. After some edits to a driver file or two, the Action Replay software under Windows happily accepted my homebrew thingamabob as an Xbox Memory Card.

Instructions here. Maybe there's something of use for your situation.
posted by chazlarson at 1:35 PM on March 18

oaf: This isn't true, in my experience. SAV doesn't catch everything, but the free ones are laughably bad.

See here: avast! is rated almost exactly as highly as Symantec (97.3% vs. 97.4%). Though they're testing avast! pro, avast! home (the free one) has the same performance; it just doesn't have the same interface or automatic scanning options.
posted by koeselitz at 1:50 PM on March 18

Strictly speaking, that hack isn't changing the device's VID/PID; it is changing a driver's target VID/PID so the driver gets loaded for the wrong device.

Worth a go maybe; the issues here will be (a) finding a driver to hack that will still manage to drive his device satisfactorily, and (b) loading a different driver still may not convince his antivirus -- depends if it's matching by a list of approved drivers or a list of approved VID/PIDs.

(But yeah -- XBox hackers are clever.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 2:00 PM on March 18