DuckyAPI

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Control your Ducky Keyboard's RGB lighting

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# DuckyAPI
Control your Ducky Keyboard's RGB lighting via a named pipe. Can be used to create
your own custom effects and interact with other software, etc. This was developed
for Ducky Shine 7 but might work for other keyboard (untested). Firmware version:
V1.01.04.

The following is a video of some sample programs in action.

[![Hacked Ducky Shine 7](https://img.youtube.com/vi/qrfjqkIY_k0/0.jpg)](https://youtu.be/qrfjqkIY_k0)

Disclaimer: This code might make your computer bluescreen, brick your keyboard or
expose your system to security vulnerabilities. Use at your own risk or at least
read through the code first.

## The API
The API itself is a named pipe created by a c++ program based on hidapi. The code is
based on the hidapi sample. To talk to the API, send commands to the named pipe
**\\\\.\pipe\DuckyController**

The commands are sent in batches separated by ;

The following commands can be sent:
* INITIALIZE - Takes control of the keyboard
* RESET - Set all key colors to black (no lighting)
* PUSH - Pushes the current set of colors to the keyboard
* TERMINATE - Give control back to the keyboard firmware
* \<Key name\> \<R\> \<G\> \<B\> - Set the color of a key

The different key names can be found in ColorSetter.cpp.
Note that the keyboard used had Scandinavian key caps and the keys has been named
using a Swedish layout. It should be fairly easy to replace the names should you
prefer another language.

Some examples:

INITIALIZE;F 40 255 255;PUSH;

RESET;H 20 20 20;R 160 56 14;UmlautA 0 0 2;PUSH;

RESET;TERMINATE;

When compiling you might need to copy the .txt files into the directory. In the
release directory you can find the exe and dll should you not want to compile the
project.

## Sample Programs
In the scripts directory you can find the source code for the programs shown in
the video.
Python dependencies:
* pywin32
* keyboard
* numpy
* The following fork of PyAudio: https://github.com/intxcc/pyaudio_portaudio

### snake.py
This one shows some different color changing effects you can use

### audio.py
Visualizes audio output on the keyboard. You will need to find your audio device
for this to work though. There are some comments in the code regarding this.

### message.py
Displays a message on the keyboard

## How To

This section describes how I reverse engineered the protocol and built this API.
Background: I wanted to control the RGB lights of a keyboard, so I searched for
different keyboards with the RGB feature and found Ducky to have some software
which allows you to reconfigure the light effects, implying that it is indeed
possible to control the keyboard over USB.

After testing the software and various effects I found a feature which allows you
to customize the color of each button so I decided to focus on this feature and
attempt to analyze the USB packets sent to the keyboard when utilizing it.

To do this I used [Wireshark](https://www.wireshark.org/) and the
[USBPcap](https://desowin.org/usbpcap/) plugin in particular. You can run
USBPcapCMD.exe to get some initial information regarding your USB devices. However
this doesn't help all that much.

![USBPcapCMD.exe](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Latedi/DuckyAPI/master/HowTo/usbpcap.jpg)

Then in Wireshark you can sniff the traffic to and from the different USB interfaces
and see if you can find your keyboard.

![Wireshark interfaces](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Latedi/DuckyAPI/master/HowTo/wireshark1.jpg)

The Ducky Shine 7 is easily spotted if you try the different interfaces since it will
send packets when you press keys on the keyboard. Note that you might have problems
sniffing some ports so try different USB ports if you encounter errors here.

Starting the Ducky software called DuckyRGBSeries, about 1200 packets are sent back
and forth. Disregard these for now. By selecting the tab called LED Zone Cuztomization
you can set the color independently on every single key. Mark the last packet in
Wireshark and then change the color of a single key (use only the mouse for a clean
capture, or another keyboard). This will show that 10 packets are sent to the keyboard,
and 10 responses are sent back. These 10 packets are what is setting the color on the
keyboard and you will notice similar packets being sent every time you change the
color on a key.

![Packets changing the colors](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Latedi/DuckyAPI/master/HowTo/wireshark2.jpg)

Now by look at the bytes and with some trial and error, it's easy to see that the
RGB values for a key are sent in these packets. For example setting the Enter key to
the RGB values 64, 100, 255 shows the hexadecimal forms of these values in the
sixth packet: 40, 64, FF

![Values for Enter](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Latedi/DuckyAPI/master/HowTo/wireshark3.jpg)

After this I enumerated every single key by giving them unique values and noting down
which packet they were sent in and at what offset in the packet. The following picture
shows how it looked like halfway through this process. I started with values 64 2 2
and increased each key like 64 3 3, 64 4 4 and so on.

![Ducky software keys](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Latedi/DuckyAPI/master/HowTo/duckySoftwareKeys.jpg)

We can also see some bytes that appear to be the same every time. These are probably
some form of header values, telling the keyboard and the software what type of packet
it is and how to parse the data sent. In Wireshark you will want to focus on the
"Leftover Capture Data" as the bytes before that are part of how a USB device
communicates with the computer.

![First packet](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Latedi/DuckyAPI/master/HowTo/wireshark4.jpg)

This image is the first packet sent every time and it always has the same values.

![Final packet](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Latedi/DuckyAPI/master/HowTo/wireshark5.jpg)

This is the final packet sent every time and it also always has the same values.

As for the packets in between, they are obviously not static as they change with
the colors we set. However some parts are always the same here too. Notably there
is also an index value noting the packet number, starting at 00 and ending at 07.
In other words we sent the first packet, 0 to 7 = 8 color packets and the final
packet for a total of 10.

From this I guessed the following:

The first packet
* Static
* Starts with the header 56 81
* The byte at offset 4 is set to 01
* The byte at offset 8 is set to 08
* The bytes from 12-15 are all set to AA
* Everything else is 0
    
The final packet
* Static
* Starts with the header 51 28
* The byte at offset 4 is set to FF
* Everything else is 0

The color packets
* Not static
* Starts with the header 56 83
* The byte at offset 2 is the index byte, starting at 0 and ending at 07
* RGB values for different keys are sent in the order R, G, B at preset offsets and
packets. The colors can also span two packets if they start at one of the last bytes.
To see the list of packet numbers and offsets see the file ColorSetter.cpp
* The very first packet has an extra long header which can also be found in
ColorSetter.cpp

At this point we know exactly how to construct the packets to set the color of the
keyboard, however simply sending them will not work. That is because of the way that
the Ducky software needs to take control of the keyboard first, and then later on
release the control back to the keyboard. Or something like that, we don't even
need to know exactly what is going on.

In order to do this, we will simply replay the traffic sent from the Ducky software
when it takes control and releases it. Now a problem here seems to be that you can't
export USB traffic from Wireshark easily. I opted to use the File -> Export Packet 
Dissections -> ... tool in order to export the packets (Important note when exporting: 
You have to expand the data you want to export in the disector or Wireshark will not 
export that data). However Wireshark will not allow you to export data and metadata
simultaneously. So what I did is I exported both as plaintext and to "C" arrays, and
then used a python script to parse these files and outputting into a more suitable
format. This can be found in the script packetComparer.py. This script has the ability
to read txt and array files, combine the files and then compare to another set of files.
I used this to compare the conversations from different starts of the Ducky software to
look for differences. Really what you want though is the last couple of lines where the
data is saved into a combined file.

Armed with the knowledge to construct packets and the data to replay in order to
take/release control we can now proceed and write software to talk to the keyboard.
Really at this point I tried about 5 different libraries, failed and settled for the
tried and true HIDAPI. The replayed packets also gives about 500 packets back which
are not the expected responses (Maybe it's keyboard configurations I changed or
something) but that does not interfere with actually taking control of the keyboard.

Since I wanted to program using python, preferably, I made the program talking
to the keyboard into a sort of API which takes input from a named pipe. You can
send data to it as described above.

## Useful links

Some reading I found useful during this project in no particular order. This should
give you a good starting point if you have 0 experience with USB like I had.

* https://blog.sverrirs.com/2015/10/how-to-use-xbox-360-big-button.html
* https://blog.sverrirs.com/2016/04/reverse-engineer-usb-protocol.html
* https://www.beyondlogic.org/usbnutshell/usb1.shtml
* https://www.daskeyboard.io/get-started/

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