Rubber Ducky issues when using virtual machines in VMWare Workstation

[Wabbe]

Hi,

I recently did some extensive testing with different payloads on several machines and I stumbled on the fact that the RB does not stream it's string commands correctly when using a virtual machine on VMWare Workstation. It is obvious that this is a major drawback since virtual machines will allow for extensive / flexible testing of different scenario's and environments.

The RB works perfectly on the physical hosts, but when the RB is connected to the VM, characters (from the string commands) are being omitted or altered. Succes rate of the RB is around 20%, which means that this behaviour occurs about 80% of the time.

There is no real pattern as to which characters are omitted, or when this happens, it just looks as if some issues occur when streaming the command from the physical layer up to the virtual layer within the VM's.

What did I test :

- tested the RB's (two different devices) on the host machines (3 different computers with plenty of memory and available cores (so no oversubscription)) : success rate : 100% (did over 100 tests)

- tested the RB's (same as above) on VM's (WIN7) running in VMWare Workstation of the hosts above : success rate 20%, 80% loss or alteration of characters (did more than 100 different tests).

- Tested with different flash firmwares (classical and twinduck (version 2 and 2.1)) with comparable results.

- Tested the virtual machines on VMWare 10, 11 and the latest version 12 (with all the same results)

VMWare support :

- tested the quirks documented on the VMWare support forum with th vid & pid, reset,refresh and setconfig options (with no result wich is not surprising because it does work 20% of the time)

- tested the quirck documented on the VMWare support forum in order to allow usb HID detection (with no result which is also not surprising because this is not really the issue, but tested it anyway for completeness).

Can anybody confirm this behaviour (omitting and/or altering characters from string commands) is indeed a problem with VMWare Workstation (or even player, did not have any chance to test this (running out of hardware ;-)) ?

Can anybody tell me how to go further from here in order to get the issue analyzed/fixed (I don't have the means or knowledge to analyze the usb traffic and/or communication protocols used) ?

I also wonder if this behaviour occurs when using ESXi hosts. Will the RB be able to stream it's commands to any virtual server that has the USB connectors assigned ? Implications might be big, but just guessing (and I'm not able to test this anyway) ...

I do understand that the issued might be VMWare related, but since I have no other usb issues on any of the computers (and/or VMWare Workstation versions) chances are the issue is actualy RB related.

If it quacks like a duck, looks like a duck and sounds like duck,it just might be a duck ;-)

Any feedback welcome !

Kind regards,

Wabbe