We’re happy to announce that BusKill is presenting at DEF CON 32.
What: Open Hardware Design for BusKill Cord
When: 2024-08-10 12:00 – 13:45
Where: W303 – Third Floor – LVCC West Hall
Update 2024-09-04 Added slide deck pdf
Today we’re ecstatic to publish our first demo showing a homemade BusKill Cable (in the prototype 3D-printed case) triggering a lockscreen.
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.
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.
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.
Last month, I successfully triggered a lockscreen event using our 3D-printed BusKill prototype.
Watch the below video to see a demonstration of BusKill running on all of the below-listed systems.
Transparency is important. As we launch our crowdfunding campaign (making the BusKill cable available for purchase for the first time), we wanted to provide a clear video demo showing the cable in-use in all tested platforms:
BusKill was tested to work in Windows 10.
Visit docs.buskill.in for instructions on how you can build your own BusKill cable and download the BusKill app for Windows.
Or you can buy a BusKill kit with the BusKill Windows app pre-installed on the the included USB drive.
BusKill was tested to work in MacOS 10.15 (Catalina).
Visit docs.buskill.in for instructions on how you can build your own BusKill cable and download the MacOS .dmg release.
Or you can buy a BusKill kit with the BusKill MacOS app pre-installed on the the included USB drive.
BusKill was tested to work in Ubuntu Linux.
Visit docs.buskill.in for instructions on how you can build your own BusKill cable and download the Linux .AppImage release.
Or you can buy a BusKill kit with the BusKill Linux app pre-installed on the the included USB drive.
BusKill was tested to work with TAILS (The Amnesic Incognito Live System).
While you could use the BusKill Linux .AppImage release with a second USB drive while using TAILS, the recommended solution for security-critical users is to just use the BusKill cable in-line with the TAILS live USB drive. This takes advantage of
Visit docs.buskill.in for instructions on how you can build your own BusKill cable to use with TAILS.
Or you can buy a BusKill cable to support the BusKill project.
BusKill was also tested to work with QubesOS.
Due to the design of QubesOS (dom0, sys-usb, etc), the BusKill GUI app does not support QubesOS. Instead, QubesOS support is implemented using the qubes-rpc and a set of scripts stored in sys-usb and dom0.
For more information on how to use BusKill in QubesOS, see our BusKill guide for QubesOS.
Visit docs.buskill.in for instructions on how you can build your own BusKill cable to use with QubesOS.
Or you can buy a BusKill cable to support the BusKill project.
This post will describe how to add a trigger that initiates a “self-destruct” sequence when your BusKill laptop kill cord’s connection is severed–rendering your data permanently & irrevocably destroyed in the event that your laptop were physically separated from you (ie: by a snach-and-run thief).
Many people were disappointed when the original post introducing BusKill only alluded to a self-destruct trigger, without actually describing how to use it with BusKill. This was done for two reasons:
This article will provide that thorough analysis and explain to the reader how to implement a self-destruct trigger with BusKill on linux machines that have FDE with LUKS.