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I thought something along these lines when it comes to peripherals, too, but don't these (mice and keyboards chiefly) communicate with PCs through a subset of the USB standard which only handles HID and nothing else?

Would any snooping be possible through an input device if it only did HID?

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> PCs through a subset of the USB standard which only handles HID and nothing else?

Yes. Is the device truly limited to doing just that, though? No way to know. I don't know enough electronics to tear it down and analyze its parts, much less dump firmware and reverse engineer it.

>Would any snooping be possible through an input device if it only did HID?

For all I know, it could be silently storing every keystroke in some small memory module hidden somewhere.

We had that problem with PS/2 keyboards too, you can buy hardware keyloggers for those.

AFAIK it wasn't possible for a PS/2 connected thing to suddenly present itself as some sort of drive, present a file on that, and then have that executed via autoload, or so.

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