Hak5's official repository of community-maintained DuckyScript payloads, extensions and language layouts for the USB Rubber Ducky, serving as both a payload library and an educational reference for authorized security professionals studying HID keystroke injection.
| Tool | hak5/usbrubberducky-payloads — official community payload library for the Hak5 USB Rubber Ducky |
| Category | Keystroke injection / HID attack payload repository (PowerShell, DuckyScript) |
| Primary Use | Sourcing and studying DuckyScript 3.0 payload.txt sources for authorized penetration tests, physical-security assessments and end-user security awareness training |
| Safe Use | For authorized penetration testers with written permission, lab environments, and defenders building detection content; the README itself carries explicit legal disclaimers and warns payloads are community-contributed and not guaranteed functional |
| Telemetry Note | Ducky activity is observable as rapid HID keystroke sequences, ATTACKMODE USB descriptor changes (HID/storage hotplug events), and anomalous automation artifacts such as PowerShell child processes spawned from interactive sessions — high-value signals for endpoint and USB monitoring |
Few artifacts in offensive security carry the cultural weight of the USB Rubber Ducky, and hak5/usbrubberducky-payloads is its canonical payload vault. With just over six thousand stars and a dominant PowerShell language profile, the repository collects community-developed payloads, extensions and keyboard language layouts written in official DuckyScript — Hak5's purpose-built language for keystroke injection and automation. This is not a tool you install so much as a corpus you read: every entry is a human-readable payload.txt source file that documents, in a few lines of DSL, exactly how an attacker or administrator might automate a task a human would normally type by hand.
The underlying premise, as the README frames it, is the inherent trust operating systems extend to the HID — Human Interface Device — class. Computers trust keyboards because keyboards are proxies for humans; a device that enumerates as a keyboard is effectively treated as a person. The USB Rubber Ducky exploits that trust model by presenting itself as an innocuous flash drive to a human observer while behaving as a keyboard to the host, injecting keystrokes at machine speed. For defenders, this repository is therefore a map of the exact input sequences that trust assumption can be abused to deliver, which is precisely why it belongs in an authorized assessment and blue-team reading list rather than anywhere else.
The repository's architecture is worth pausing on. Unlike the interpreted DuckyScript variants running on Hak5's Bash Bunny, Key Croc and the licensed O.MG devices, the USB Rubber Ducky consumes compiled artifacts: a payload.txt source is compiled into an inject.bin binary via PayloadStudio, Hak5's browser-based, entirely client-side IDE. The README is explicit that payloads in this repository are source code only and must be compiled through that toolchain before use, and that Hak5 does not guarantee payload functionality — a candid disclaimer that also matters forensically, since nothing here is a turnkey executable.
DuckyScript itself has evolved significantly, and the README traces that history usefully. Version 1.0, introduced with the original 2010 device, famously consisted of just three commands — a minimalism that made the technique learnable in minutes. DuckyScript 3.0, shipped with the 2022 hardware revision, is a structured programming language that remains fully backwards compatible with 1.0 payloads. It adds conditional control flow, loops, functions and an extensions system, plus injection-specific features like ATTACKMODE switching between HID and storage personas, OS Detection to target the right platform, Keystroke Reflection for exfiltration scenarios, and jitter and randomization primitives that humanize timing. For an analyst, each of those features corresponds directly to a detection or hardening conversation.
The hotplug semantics deserve attention in any authorized workflow. Because the device can switch between ATTACKMODE personas, a single deployment may enumerate as a storage device, then re-enumerate as a keyboard — a USB descriptor flip that endpoint management tooling can and should alarm on. OS Detection means payloads can conditionally branch on the host platform, which is why cross-platform deployment packs in this repository often carry multiple branch structures in a single source file. Reading those structures is a compact education in how attackers think about portability.
The jitter and randomization features are the most interesting from a defensive telemetry perspective. Human typing is irregular; machine keystroke injection is not, unless deliberately perturbed. DuckyScript 3.0's ability to introduce timing noise exists partly to defeat the heuristic that a burst of perfectly regular keystrokes following USB enumeration is automated. Blue teams building behavioral detections around keystroke cadence, especially post-hotplug, should assume their adversaries know about and use these primitives, and design thresholds accordingly.
Keystroke Reflection, highlighted in the README with an accompanying whitepaper, extends the model from injection toward exfiltration — leveraging the keyboard channel in reverse. It is a good example of why this repository rewards study even for practitioners who will never plug a Ducky into anything: the technique inventory documents the outer boundary of what a trusted HID channel can be made to do, and that boundary should inform policies around physical USB port control, lock-screen discipline, and interactive-session monitoring.
Contribution mechanics also tell you something about quality control. Payloads are community-submitted via pull requests, surfaced through a featured-payload leaderboard and the related payloadhub.com index, and incentivized through the Hak5 Payload Awards. There is no formal review guarantee — the README says so plainly — so professionals mining the library for ideas should treat every payload.txt as unreviewed third-party code: read it line by line, understand every DELAY, STRING and ATTACKMODE statement, and never compile and deploy something you cannot fully explain. That review discipline is itself excellent DuckyScript literacy training.
Where does this fit in legitimate practice? The obvious contexts are physical penetration tests with explicit authorization covering workstation access, security awareness demonstrations showing personnel what an unattended, unlocked machine concedes to a thumb-drive-looking device, and lab research into HID trust and endpoint detection. The original technique, as the README recounts, was developed by Hak5's founder to automate mundane IT tasks — printers, network shares — and that benign automation lineage is still the right mental model for what the language fundamentally is.
For the defensive side, the repository doubles as a detection-content quarry. Each payload's structure reveals the artifacts it leaves: spawned shells, PowerShell one-liner patterns, run-box history, scheduled tasks, and the inject.bin compilation footprint if a device is later recovered. Correlating rapid-fire keystroke delivery with first-touch process ancestry — particularly interpreter processes launched from explorer.exe or cmd.exe immediately after a USB event — is a durable pattern this library lets you study at source level.
Caveats are real and the README is honest about them: functionality is unguaranteed, the ecosystem is partly commercial (PayloadStudio Pro, courses, hardware), and the repository is more catalog than framework — there is no runner, no management layer, just sources and language assets. Treat it as documentation of a technique family with a decade-plus of evolution behind it.
In sum, hak5/usbrubberducky-payloads is best read as the living textbook of keystroke injection: a star-heavy, actively maintained corpus where DuckyScript 3.0's control flow, attack modes and anti-heuristic features are visible in real, community-authored source files. Authorized testers will find inspiration for physical engagements; defenders will find the exact grammar of the attacks they need to detect; and everyone will find a reminder that the weakest link in the HID trust model is that computers still cannot tell a hacker culture icon from a human at a keyboard.
hak5/usbrubberducky-payloads.Educational analysis for authorized security professionals. Use only in controlled, authorized environments.
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