Disable USB hub

I wish to be able for security reasons to be able to disable all of my USB ports, to do this without having to do every USB port individually, I would have to disable my entire USB hub, so that really is my question, how would I go about disabling my USB hub?

I am running Ubuntu 14.10, and the command lsusb returns the following output:

Bus 002 Device 003: ID 058f:6366 Alcor Micro Corp. Multi Flash Reader Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 003: ID 5986:0295 Acer, Inc Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub 

If you need for me to provide any more information to my question to help you answer it then please let me know.

2 Answers

That should be possible from BIOS. Another option is to write a udev rule to unbind any USB root hub driver: ohci-pci (USB 1.1), ehci-pci (USB 2.0) and xhci_hcd (USB 3.0).

1. Create new rules file

   sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/90-disable-usb.rules 

2. Add these rule lines

   DRIVERS=="?hci-pci", RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo -n %k >/sys%p/driver/unbind'" DRIVERS=="xhci_hcd", RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo -n %k >/sys%p/driver/unbind'" 

3. Reboot

Notes:

• Example how to check which driver and other device attributes to use them in udev rule:

  udevadm info --name=/dev/bus/usb/001/001 --attribute-walk 

  or

  lsusb -t 

• Depending on your hardware/platform. There are many USB host drivers. Check Linux source

If you want to disable the entire USB hub so that no mice, keyboards, USB sticks whatever can be used, just do a:

lsmod | grep usb 

and blacklist all modules that contain usb in the first column.

I'm sorry? Mice and stuff still need to work? Oh! Only blacklist usb_storage then!

;-)