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Is it possible to tunnel a USB drive (thumb-drive, WD Passport, etc.) to a virtual guest machine, so that the host machine only sees the contents as raw data?

The application of this would be to more safely access a USB device that may or may not have malware included.

Note:

  • I am not looking for USB passthrough, as that is allowing a guest machine to directly access host machine hardware.
  • I simply want the data on a thumb-drive to be insulated from the host machine as it passes to the virtual machine.
  • I am using VirtualBox (just in case there are some vendor-specific solutions)
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This is possible and easy.

  • Plug the USB stick (or whatever USB peripherial you want) into a linux box (could be something like this for $15), this part is completely under your control
  • Configure and run a usbip server
  • In your client install the usbip client drivers
  • Access your USB device via the network (not as a file share - as a raw USB device)
  • Added bonus: This works exceptionally well to connect things like scanners, printers or USB-Serial adapters to a VM, i.e. bridge the virtual machine to physical world gap.
  • for paranoia: Run the usbip session through an SSH tunnel
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