In celebration of Bitcoin Black Friday 2023, we're offering a 10% discount on all BusKill cables sold between Nov 18 to Dec 03.
Tag: hardware
Featured Updates
BusKill im Ladengeschäft erhältlich (Leipzig ProxySto.re)
🇬🇧 English version of this article.
Wir freuen uns bekannt zu geben, dass BusKill-Kabel zum ersten Mal persönlich in einem Ladengeschäft in Deutschland (Leipzig) gekauft werden kann.
BusKill available in-store (Leipzig ProxySto.re)
🇩🇪 Deutsche Version dieses Artikels
We're happy to announce that, for the first time ever, BusKill cables can be purchased in-person in Leipzig, Germany.
The BusKill project has partnered with ProxyStore to make BusKill laptop kill cords finally available from a brick-and-mortar location. You can now go to the following location and purchase a BusKill cable with cash or cryptocurrency.
Bernhard-Göring-Straße 162
04277 Leipzig
Germany
3D Printable BusKill Proof-of-Concept
We're happy to announce that we were successfully able to initiate a BusKill lockscreen trigger using a 3D-printed BusKill prototype!
While we do what we can to allow at-risk folks to purchase BusKill cables anonymously, there is always the risk of interdiction.
We don’t consider hologram stickers or tamper-evident tape/crisps/glitter to be sufficient solutions to supply-chain security. Rather, the solution to these attacks is to build open-source, disassembleable, and easily inspectable hardware whose integrity can be validated without damaging the device and without sophisticated technology.
Actually, the best way to confirm the integrity of your hardware is to build it yourself. Fortunately, printing your own circuit boards, microcontroller, or silicon has a steeper learning curve than a BusKill cable -- which is essentially just a USB extension cable with a magnetic breakaway in the middle.
Mitigating interdiction via 3D printing is one of many reasons that Melanie Allen has been diligently working on prototyping a 3D-printable BusKill cable this year. In this article, we hope to showcase her progress and provide you some OpenSCAD and .stl files so you can experiment with building your own and help test and improve our designs.
ⓘ Note: This post is adapted from its original article on Melanie Allen's blog.
Demo
Last month, I successfully triggered a lockscreen event using our 3D-printed BusKill prototype.
3D Printable BusKill Prototypes
We're happy to announce that we've had good progress on the design of the 3D printable BusKill USB-A magnetic breakaway couplers this year!
While we do what we can to allow at-risk folks to purchase BusKill cables anonymously, there is always the risk of interdiction.
We don’t consider hologram stickers or tamper-evident tape/crisps/glitter to be sufficient solutions to supply-chain security. Rather, the solution to these attacks is to build open-source, disassembleable, and easily inspectable hardware whose integrity can be validated without damaging the device and without sophisticated technology.
Actually, the best way to confirm the integrity of your hardware is to build it yourself. Fortunately, printing your own circuit boards, microcontroller, or silicon has a steeper learning curve than a BusKill cable -- which is essentially just a USB extension cable with a magnetic breakaway in the middle.
Mitigating interdiction via 3D printing is one of many reasons that Melanie Allen has been diligently working on prototyping a 3D-printable BusKill cable this year. In this article, we hope to showcase her progress and provide you some OpenSCAD and .stl files so you can experiment with building your own and help test and improve our designs.
ⓘ Note: This post is adapted from its original article on Melanie Allen's blog.
Developing the Prototype
Ideation
A few years ago, Michael asked me if I was interested in developing a 3D-printed case for the magnetic breakaway. He enumerated the following design requirements:
- The case should be as small as possible, because it shouldn’t block neighboring ports, nor sit heavy in the port causing it to bump into objects on the desk.
- The case should be able to be dissembled, so that people can make sure it isn’t tampered with. It shouldn’t be glued together.
- In order to avoid using glue, we had a factory specially manufacture some hexagonal shaped magnets that we believed would be able to sit inside the printed part without glue.
- Much like USB breakaways that are designed to prevent wear and tear on ports, the case would house a pogo pins and magnets, and a USB.
However, over the past years' iterations, we adjusted the requirements:
Bitcoin Black Friday (10% discount on BusKill)
In celebration of Bitcoin Black Friday 2022, we're offering a 10% discount on all BusKill cables sold between Nov 19 to Dec 04.
BusKill v0.5.0 released
We're happy to announce the release of BusKill v0.5.0
Upgrading
You can upgrade your BusKill app to the latest version either by
- Clicking "Update" in the app or
- Downloading it from GitHub
BusKill is finally here
We're very excited to announce that BusKill cables are now available for purchase via CrowdSupply!
This week we launched the BusKill crowdfunding campaign on CrowdSupply.
The DIY guide to build a BusKill laptop kill cord was released last year. Designed to protect journalists, activists, travelers, and crypto traders -- this USB Dead Man's Switch can trigger your computer to lock if someone physically snatches your computer away from you while you're using it.
You can buy a BusKill cable today from CrowdSupply:
You can also buy a BusKill cable with bitcoin, monero, and other altcoins directly from our BusKill Store:
Introducing BusKill: A Kill Cord for your Laptop
This post will introduce a simple udev rule and ~$20 in USB hardware that effectively implements a kill cord Dead Man Switch to trigger your machine to self-destruct in the event that you're kicked out of the helm position.
ⓘ Note: This is an old article that is out-of-date.
To learn how to install BusKill, see our BusKill GUI App Documentation.
Let's consider a scenario: You're at a public location (let's say a cafe) while necessarily authenticated into some super important service (let's say online banking). But what if--after you've carefully authenticated--someone snatch-and-runs with your laptop?
Maybe you can call your bank to freeze your accounts before they've done significant financial harm. Maybe you can't.
Or maybe your laptop was connected to your work VPN. In less than 60 seconds and with the help of a rubber ducky, the thief could literally cause millions of dollars in damages to your organization.
Surely there must be some solution to trigger your computer to lock, shutdown, or self-destruct when it's physically separated from you! There is: I call it BusKill.