What is ChoiceJacking?

ChoiceJacking is a class of USB attacks, demonstrated in 2025 by researchers at Graz University of Technology, in which a malicious charger spoofs your own taps to approve a data connection - defeating the “trust this computer?” prompt that mobile devices rely on to stop juice jacking. The work was peer-reviewed and presented at the 34th USENIX Security Symposium.

What the research actually showed

• The attacks gained access to user files on tested devices from eight vendors, including the top six by market share.
• On tested devices from two vendors, files could be extracted even while the device was locked.
• The fastest measured attack completed in 133 milliseconds - on many devices the only visible sign is a brief flicker on the screen.
• The findings were acknowledged by the industry: Google and Samsung assigned CVE-2024-43085 and CVE-2024-20900, and vendors are patching.

The honest context

Documented real-world juice-jacking attacks remain rare - Kaspersky's 2025 analysis put it plainly: “no real-world attacks have ever been publicly documented.” ChoiceJacking is capability research, not evidence of attacks in the wild. What it changes is the defense story: the software prompt you were told to rely on has now been bypassed in the lab, on current devices, by spoofing the user's own input.

What a physical disconnect changes

Every ChoiceJacking variant operates over the USB data connection. A cable whose data lines are physically disconnected leaves nothing for the attack to travel over - regardless of your phone's patch status. That is the design principle behind Lion Cables' switchable cables: protection that doesn't depend on software behaving correctly.

Related reading: What is juice jacking? · Data blocker vs. switchable cable