Disclaimer: While we gave samxplogs a free BusKill Kit for review, we did not pay them nor restrict their impartiality and freedom to publish an independent review. We did require them to make the video open-source as a condition of receiving this free review unit. The above video is licensed CC BY-SA; you are free to redistribute it. If you are a video producer and would like a free BusKill Kit for review, please contact us
Want to see BusKill in-action? Checkout these video demos made by YouTuber @samxplogs showing the BusKill cable in-use on several supported platforms:
This BusKill 2025 Annual Report will discuss the state of the BusKill project at the end of 2025 and the progress we made throughout the year 2025.
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.
This funding is available for volunteers of the BusKill project. Please see the article for info on how you can apply to receive this funding.
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.
We’re elated to see BusKill join the ranks next to CryptPad, ExifTool, KeePassXC, Whonix, Wireshark, Tor Project, Calyx, and numerous other awesome projects that have received grants from FUTO.
We’d like to express our deepest gratitude to the FUTO project for supporting future development of our hardware tool to protect journalists, activists, human rights defenders, whistleblowers, and others. Thank you!
Iterate with us!
Want to print your own BusKill cable? We’ll cover your expenses for filament, magnets, and pogo pins.
The BusKill project is looking for a volunteer to write the documentation describing how to print and build your own BusKill cable. The documentation will be written for our Sphinx Documentation Site in reStructuredText and pushed in git.
If you have access to a 3D-Printer, please contact us to receive funds to buy the components needed to document the build of a 3D-Printed BusKill.
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.
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.
Disclaimer: While we gave samxplogs a free BusKill Kit for review, we did not pay them nor restrict their impartiality and freedom to publish an independent review. We did require them to make the video open-source as a condition of receiving this free review unit. The above video is licensed CC BY-SA; you are free to redistribute it. If you are a video producer and would like a free BusKill Kit for review, please contact us
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.