Buskill V0
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BusKill is an
open-source hardware Open-source hardware (OSH) consists of physical artifacts of technology designed and offered by the open-design movement. Both free and open-source software (FOSS) and open-source hardware are created by this open-source culture movement and a ...
and software project that designs computer
kill cord A dead man's switch (see alternative names) is a switch that is designed to be activated or deactivated if the human operator becomes incapacitated, such as through death, loss of consciousness, or being bodily removed from control. Originally a ...
s to protect the confidentiality of the system's data from physical theft. The hardware designs are licensed CC-BY-SA and the software is licensed GPLv3. BusKill cables are available commercially from the official website or through authorized distributors. The name BusKill is an amalgamation of "Bus" from USB and "Kill" from kill cord.


History

The first computer kill cord was built by Michael Altfield in 2017 The term "BusKill" was coined by Altfield in January 2020 when publishing the first BusKill build and udev usage instructions (Linux-only), and it was ported by cyberkryption from Linux to Windows a couple weeks later. The project's official website launched the following month. The first OS X version of the BusKill app was released in May 2020 by Steven Johnson. A cross-platform rewrite of the software based on Kivy was released in August 2020 with support for Linux,
OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
, and Windows. In December 2021, Alt Shift International OÜ ran a crowdfunding campaign to manufacture BusKill cables on Crowd Supply. The campaign raised $18,507 by January 2022.


Hardware

The BusKill cable is a kill cord that physically tethers a user to their computer with a USB cable. One end of the cable plugs into a computer. The other end of the cable is a carabiner that attaches to the user. In the middle of the cable is a magnetic breakaway coupler, to allow the cable to be safely separated at any angle without physically damaging the computer or the user. A 3D-printable hardware BusKill cable is currently under development.


Software

The BusKill project maintains a cross-platform GUI app that locks the screen when the cable's connection to the computer is severed and the app is in the "armed" state.


Use

If the computer is separated from the user, then a magnetic breakaway in the cable causes a USB hotplug removal event to execute a trigger in the app. The trigger executed by the BusKill cable's removal can lock the screen, shutdown, or securely erase the LUKS header and master encryption keys within a few seconds of the cable's separation. If combined with full disk encryption, then these triggers can be used to ensure the confidentiality of data or be used as a counter-forensics device.


See also

* Dead man's switch *
USBKill USBKill is anti-forensic software distributed via GitHub, written in Python for the BSD, Linux, and OS X operating systems. It is designed to serve as a kill switch if the computer on which it is installed should fall under the control of indiv ...
* Tails (operating system) * List of data-erasing software * List of free and open-source software packages


References


External links

* * Software using the GPL license Free and open-source software Free software programmed in Python Anti-forensic software Computer security software Security software Windows security software MacOS security software Linux security software Cross-platform software USB {{Cryptographic software