Tag: melanie allen

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Install BusKill with apt (Debian, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Kali, TAILS)
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Techlore Interview (BusKill, Interdiction, and OpSec)

We’re super happy to share that Techlore invited BusKill founder Michael Altfield onto their YouTube channel to talk about BusKill, security, and privacy

In addition to answering questions about the origin of BusKill, the interview ran a gamut of issues regarding security and privacy — including

  1. How to mitigate State-sponsored interdiction attacks,
  2. minimizing attack surfaces of mobile phones with broadband processors,
  3. the threats of AI “identity verification” systems on privacy,
  4. and much more

You can watch the full video below

Can’t see video above? Watch it on PeerTube at tehlore.tv or on YouTube at youtu.be/cptk6aBbJpU

To see the full discussion about this video on PeerTube, see:

What is BusKill?

BusKill is a laptop kill-cord. It’s a USB cable with a magnetic breakaway that you attach to your body and connect to your computer.


If the connection between you to your computer is severed, then your device will lock, shutdown, or shred its encryption keys — thus keeping your encrypted data safe from thieves that steal your device.

Techlore Review

If you’d like to see Techlore’s review video of BusKill, you can find that here:

BusKill Techlore Review

Support BusKill

If you want to help our open-source project, please consider purchasing a BusKill cable for yourself or a loved one. It helps us fund further development, and you get your own BusKill cable to keep you or your loved ones safe.

You can also buy a BusKill cable with bitcoin, monero, and other altcoins from our BusKill Store’s .onion site

Bitcoin Accepted Here

Monero Accepted Here

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3D-Printable BusKill Prototype Demo

Today we’re ecstatic to publish our first demo showing a homemade BusKill Cable (in the prototype 3D-printed case) triggering a lockscreen.

[BusKill] 3D Printable Dead Man Switch (Demo)

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, 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, BusKill doesn’t have any circuit boards, microcontrollers, or silicon; it’s trivial to print your own BusKill cable — which is essentially 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 with some OpenSCAD and .stl files you can use to build your own version of the prototype, if you want to help us test and improve the design.

ⓘ Note: This post is adapted from its original article on Melanie Allen’s blog.

Demo


In our last update, I showed a video demo where I succesfully triggered a lockscreen using a BusKill prototype without the 3D-printed body for the case and N35 disc magnets. I realized that the N35 disc magnets were not strong enough. In this update, I show a demo with the prototype built inside a 3D-printed case and with (stronger) N42 and N52 cube magnets.

Can’t see video above? Watch it on PeerTube or on YouTube at youtu.be/vFTQatw94VU

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