Tag: linux

Featured Updates

BusKill Demos (Windows, MacOS, Linux, TAILS, QubesOS)
LUKS Header Shredder (BusKill Self-Destruct Trigger)
BusKill available in-store (Leipzig ProxySto.re)
BusKill v0.7.0 released
BusKill goes to DEF CON 32
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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.

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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!

3D Printable BusKill Proof of Concept (2023.08)

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.


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BusKill Now Shipping!

We’re excited to announce that our first production run of BusKill cables is now in-stock in our distribution center. Existing orders are going out now, and new orders will ship immediately.

[BusKill] Our Dead Man Switch Magnetic Breakaway cables are Now Shipping!

The first BusKill prototype was born in 2017. It gained international popularity in 2020 when Michael Altfield described how to build your own BusKill cable. After extensive effort and with the help of several contributors, a Linux hacker’s DIY cable got a user-friendly, cross-platform GUI.

When the only USB-A magnetic breakaway coupler on the market became out of stock and EOL’d, we raised $18,507 on CrowdSupply in early 2022 to manufacture our own injection-molded cable. One thousand logistics challenges later, Mouser started shipping BusKill cables to our backers in October 2022.

The assembled BusKill cable is plugged-into the USB-A port of a laptop

Now that the hardware is out the door, we’re hard at work on new features for the BusKill app. Our top goal is to add a soft-shutdown trigger to the existing lock-screen trigger. At the time of writing, this is functional on Linux and Windows. We’re just working out the kinks of privilege escalation on MacOS.

To be notified when we’ve added the soft-shutdown trigger to the BusKill app, you can signup for our newsletter.


We did our best to test BusKill across the three target platforms, but the wide spread of OS versions does leave room for error. If you happen to find a bug with BusKill, please let us know.

If you don’t have a BusKill cable yet, you can buy one here on this website or build your own. And for the makers out there, checkout the progress on our 3D printable BusKill magnetic breakaway coupler 🙂

You can also buy a BusKill cable with bitcoin, monero, and other altcoins directly from our BusKill Store

Bitcoin Accepted Here

Monero Accepted Here

BusKill Demos (Windows, MacOS, Linux, TAILS, QubesOS)

Video Demo

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:

Windows

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.

MacOS

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.

Linux

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.

TAILS

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

  1. The BusKill cable’s magnetic breakaway along with
  2. The TAILS built-in emergency shutdown

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.

QubesOS

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.


A Laptop Kill Cord for QubesOS

This post will describe how to use BusKill as a dead man switch to trigger your laptop to self-destruct if it’s physically separated from you. This guide is specific to QubesOS users.

What if someone literally steals your laptop while you’re working with classified information inside a Whonix DispVM? They’d also be able to recover data from previous DispVMs–as Disposable VM’s rootfs virtual files are not securely shredded after your DispVM is destroyed.

QubesOS Logo
QubesOS: A reasonably secure OS

This is part one of a two-part series. For part two, see Disarm BusKill in QubesOS (2/2)

  1. A Laptop Kill Cord for QubesOS (1/2)
  2. Disarm BusKill in QubesOS (2/2)

Are you a security researcher, journalist, or intelligence operative that works in QubesOS–exploiting Qubes’ brilliant security-through-compartimentalization to keep your data safe? Do you make use of Whonix Disposable VMs for your work? Great! This post is for you.

I’m sure your QubesOS laptop has Full Disk Encryption and you’re using a strong passphrase. But what if someone literally steals your laptop while you’re working with classified information inside a Whonix DispVM? Not only will they get access to all of your AppVM’s private data and the currently-running Whonix DispVM’s data, but there’s a high chance they’d be able to recover data from previous DispVMs–as Disposable VM’s rootfs virtual files (volatile.img) are not securely shredded after your DispVM is destroyed by Qubes!

Let’s say you’re a journalist, activist, whistleblower, or a human rights worker in an oppressive regime. Or an intelligence operative behind enemy lines doing research or preparing a top-secret document behind a locked door. What do you do to protect your data, sources, or assets when the secret police suddenly batter down your door? How quickly can you actually act to shutdown your laptop and shred your RAM and/or FDE encryption keys?


BusKill utilizes a magnetic trip-wire that tethers your body to your laptop. If you suddenly jump to your feet or fall off your chair (in response to the battering ram crashing through your door) or your laptop is ripped off your table by a group of armed thugs, the data bus’ magnetic connection will be severed. This event causes a configurable trigger to execute.

The BusKill trigger can be anything from:

  1. locking your screen or
  2. shutting down the computer or
  3. initiating a self-destruct sequence

This post will describe how to setup such a system in QubesOS with BusKill

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LUKS Header Shredder (BusKill Self-Destruct Trigger)

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).

LUKS Header Shredder

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:

  1. Most people probably don’t actually want an accidental false-positive to destroy all their data and
     
  2. A self-destruct sequence should be taken seriously. Its implementation should be thoroughly thought-out, tested, and forensically analyzed

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.

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BusKill Onion Service

Today, we’re happpy to announce that there’s a new way to browse our website more securely and anonymously. To do it, you’ll need a bit of software called the Tor Browser

After the Tor Browser is installed, copy and paste this URL into the address bar to load this website:

buskillvampfih2iucxhit3qp36i2zzql3u6pmkeafvlxs3tlmot5yad.onion


buskillvamp fih2iucxhit
3qp36i2zzql 3u6pmkeafvl
xs3tlmot5ya     d.onion

Besides the obvious anonymity benefits–allowing our customers to purchase our products anonymously–we chose to make our website accessible at the above .onion address to take advantage of tor’s superior Public Key Infrastructure to the clearnet’s flawed x509 model (read: it’s more secure).

Visit this site now on our tor .onion address

Instead of using the untrustworthy X.509 PKI model, all connections to a v3 .onion address is made to a single pinned certificate that is directly correlated to the domain itself (the domain is just a hash of the public key + some metadata). Moreover, some of the most secure operating systems send all the user’s Internet traffic through the Tor network — for the ultimate data security & privacy of its users.

In short, users are much safer when communicating directly to a website using a .onion domain than its clearnet domain.

We’ve always made sure that our site’s content was fully accessible to Tor Browser on strict mode. Unlike other popular websites, we would never use Google reCAPTCHA or blanket block Tor exit nodes.

We want and encourage our customers to be able to use all of our services over Tor. And by adding our service over an Onion Service, our customers with a healthy distrust for the X.509 PKI can take comfort in knowing that accessing our website through our Onion Service address will give them end-to-end encryption using our Tor-generated certificate.

You can buy a BusKill cable with bitcoin, monero, and other altcoins directly from our BusKill Store’s Onion Site:

You can also buy a BusKill cable with bitcoin, monero, and other altcoins directly from our Clearnet 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.

BusKill: A USB Kill Cord for you Laptop

ⓘ Note: This is an old article that is out-of-date.

To learn how to install BusKill, see our BusKill GUI App Documentation.

Photo of a Rubber Ducky USB drive
Rubber Ducky I <3 you; you make hack time lots of fun!

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.

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