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Comment by userbinator

From another perspective, a floppy is also secure because it is a completely dumb storage device: it's just a piece of magnetic media in a plastic case. The drive is equally dumb, and the controller IC is usually a hard-wired logic array. The format has been around for a long time and publicly documented in standards. Contrast this with USB drives which have their own firmware and microcontrollers that can hide maliciousness, or even CD/DVD drives that also have modifiable firmware.

Someone could intercept a floppy and read/write its data, but putting malware on it and getting the receiver to execute it unnoticed is going to be much harder than with a USB drive. Putting a floppy into a drive literally does not cause any code to execute - it's only when commanded to, i.e. when the drive is accessed, that things start happening. There's no AutoPlay for floppies. Contrast this with the whole USB enumeration process.

parent userbinator 11 years ago

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