Making your usb port password protected

[motors]

Hi, newbie here.

I was wondering if there was a way to password protect your usb port (so that it would be impossible for unauthorized users to run their flash drives on your computer and impossible to auto run u3 usb's), and if doing so would protect you from a hacksaw hack.  Also, are there any standard methods to counter hacksaw/switchblade hacks?

Any info would be appreciated

[moonlit]

As it happens, I just created a tool to do some of those things, as seen here: http://forums.hak5.org/index.php/topic,8873.0.html

Besides that though, you could disable your USB ports altogether (either in Windows or your BIOS) or set policies to disable access to certain things.

[digip]

Short of disabling it under Device manager, Registry or the BIOS, I am not aware of any way to password protect removable USB drives based on anything natively built into Windows. You can use Group Policy to disable a drive, but again, this isn't password protecting it so much as just setting some flags in the system to disable it and would require admin access to unflag the items: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555324

There are third party apps that claim to be able to password protect USB drives from being able to be used, but not sure how well they work since I do not use them. Most of the searches on Google will probably turn up software to encrypt the contents of a USB drive, and this is not what you want since you are asking to prevent it from even being used at all based on Password protection. I am just not aware of how to password protect it on th fly so that in the event that you do want to use it you can type a password to allow its use.

In my thinking, someone wrote an app that can enforce the group policy part and when someone inserts removable media, it monitors the system so you have to type a password and it then disables the group policy, that might be what the third party apps do. If so, then it probably wouldn't be too hard to make one in VB or .Net that can do the same thing.

edit: I was typing this befor eMoonlit had replied, so check his link for further help...

[motors]

Thank you very much for your responses moonlit and digip.

The reason I was asking was because I think someone used a hacksaw or switchblade hack on my computer and, although I don't think I lost any serious information, I wanted to find out if there were ways to better secure one's USB hubs. I talked to a friend and he said disabling AutoPlay for my CD-ROM  would be the best solution. I have another question, just out of curiosity - are there any log files that keep track of storage devices that were at some point in time connected to a computer, like a log containing times during which USBs were inserted into USB hubs?

Thanks

[thork]

not sure about logging but this little utility shows usb devices connected or previously connected, it also shows the time it was first used and last.

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_devices_view.html

[G-Stress]

This utility might be of some interest

http://www.download3k.com/Install-USB-CopyNotify.html