The USB protocol requires that anything with USB declare itself as either a "device" or "host". "Hosts" are computers and other "big" things. "Devices" are iPod, iPads, USB thumb drives, and other "small" accessory-like things. (If you are familiar with USB OTG cables, then you probably understand a bit about this already.) If you ever want a USB "host" to pretend to be a USB "device", you need special hardware. The FaceDancer is that hardware.

Pretend to be a USB device from Python:

The FaceDancer allows a computer (or "host") to masquerade as a USB "device" to communicate with other USB devices or USB Hosts. The FaceDancer allows a developer to access data on the USB bus from high level languages like C, Python, and Ruby.

For security research purposes,Travis Goodspeed and Sergey Bratus have demonstrated that there are interesting trust relationships between USB "hosts" and USB "devices". Drivers (for example) on USB Hosts inherently trust that "devices" won't do bad things (or because it's hardware, that data won't really be malformed ;-) This trust relationship can be probed with the FaceDancer.

For non-research purposes, the FaceDancer allows USB developers and embedded developers to rapidly prototype from high level languages like Python, Java, Ruby, and C. Where tools like the awesome ones made by TotalPhase only allow for passive monitoring, generating data and injecting it into the USB bus (as a device) has required custom solutions like this FaceDancer.

In the spirit of this website, we wanted to take a step forward and help get assembled versions of this neat tool into people's hands.

This is merely an ASSEMBLED version of what is on theFaceDancer website (If you wanted one previously, you had to order the PCB from Travis, order the parts from a distributor, wait for them, then assemble it yourself).