USB Armory initialization

[Tim]

Hi all,

I bought a WithSecure USB armory Mk II and I am having trouble initializing it. 

I first used BalenaEtcher. When I click "Select a target" it says "Plug a target device" and I cannot get it to recognize the Armory. I can see a blue and white LED on when the device is plugged in and the Window Device Manager refreshes when I plug the device in or out. 

I started up a VirtualBox Ubuntu machine and I can see a device "Freescale SemiConductor Inc SE Blank 6ULL" to be connected to the VM, which I did. When I type "dmesg", I can see: 

usb 2-1: new high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci-pci

No indication of a mapping to /dev/sdX or a new device appearing. 

I also tried this:

Set the USB armory Mk II to boot in Serial Boot Loader by setting the boot switch towards the microSD slot, without a microSD card connected.

I'd like to verify some assumptions:

• My understanding is that the device has 16 GB of eMMC and I do not need to get an SDCard. 
• My understanding is that Accessing the USB armory Mk II internal eMMC as USB storage device is not something I have to do in order to flash the device.

My questions: 

• What should I expect when I connect my device to Windows or Linux? Should I immediately see /dev/sdX on linux or the ability to select a target device in balenaEtcher? 
  

Thanks

Tim

[Andrej Rosano]

Hi Tim,

please find the response in-line.

On 2024-04-22 Mon, Tim wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I bought a WithSecure USB armory Mk II and I am having trouble initializing it.
>
> I first used BalenaEtcher. When I click "Select a target" it says
> "Plug a target device" and I cannot get it to recognize the Armory. I
> can see a blue and white LED on when the device is plugged in and the
> Window Device Manager refreshes when I plug the device in or out.

BalenaEtcher is used to flash storage devices. USB armory does not
by default expose itself as a storage device.

> I started up a VirtualBox Ubuntu machine and I can see a device
> "Freescale SemiConductor Inc SE Blank 6ULL" to be connected to the VM,
> which I did. When I type "dmesg", I can see: usb 2-1: new high-speed
> USB device number 4 using ehci-pci
>
> No indication of a mapping to /dev/sdX or a new device appearing.

That is expected.

>
> I also tried this:
> Set the USB armory Mk II to boot in Serial Boot Loader by setting the
> boot switch towards the microSD slot, without a microSD card
> connected.
>
> I'd like to verify some assumptions:
>

> * My understanding is that the device has 16 GB of eMMC and I do not need to get an SDCard.

Correct.

> * My understanding is that Accessing the USB armory Mk II internal eMMC as USB storage device<https://github.com/usbarmory/usbarmory-debian-base_image?tab=readme-ov-file#accessing-the-usb-armory-mk-ii-internal-emmc-as-usb-storage-device> is not something I have to do in order to flash the device.

No, this is not correct. To access the internal eMMC you first need to
load a firmware as the armory-ums that would expose the internal eMMC to
the host.

> My questions:
>
> * What should I expect when I connect my device to Windows or Linux? Should I immediately see /dev/sdX on linux or the ability to select a target device in balenaEtcher?

You should expect to to see ""Freescale SemiConductor Inc SE Blank 6ULL"
only, no "/dev/sdX" would be exposed.

To correctly prepare your USB armory Mk II to boot Debian you should:

- downoload the eMMC version of the Debian base image [1]
- expose the internal eMMC using the instruction in the link you already
mentioned [2]
- flash the image on the exposed "/dev/sdX" as described in [3]

[1] https://github.com/usbarmory/usbarmory-debian-base_image/releases/download/20240404/usbarmory-mark-two-emmc-debian_bookworm-base_image-20240404.raw.xz
[2] https://github.com/usbarmory/usbarmory-debian-base_image?tab=readme-ov-file#accessing-the-usb-armory-mk-ii-internal-emmc-as-usb-storage-device
[3] https://github.com/usbarmory/usbarmory-debian-base_image/releases/tag/20240404

Cheers
Andrej

>
> Thanks
> Tim
>
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--
Andrej Rosano | Hardware Security | WithSecure
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