Why not have a bluetooth/wifi/customised proximity device constantly connected to your laptop (and resides in your wallet/shoes/private parts) and if you suddenly are too far away from your laptop while it's unlocked it gets purged?
BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops
121–130 of 339 posts
Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops
#122https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935359
I vaguely remember there being special hard drives with an "acid release" tab for rapid physical destruction. The military being a prime consumer. For laptops, I'm thinking a Thermite kill switch would be effective.
Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't it make sense to remove the battery on your laptop entirely? With a modified magsafe-like power cord any attempt to grab the machine hard-kills the system and RAM begins degrading immediately. Epoxy over the screw terminals would also delay an attacker long enough to prevent freezing the RAM with compressed air to try and dump RAM via an exploit kit.
>Epoxy over the screw terminals would also delay an attacker... Might as well go all in and epoxy the ram sticks/dimm slot assembly.
Would it cause overheating?
Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops
#124Good to have if you run a dark net marketplace or a political disident ring from public libraries. An additional refinement is to autolock the device if a certain personal key combo (ex. Shit - vol up - vol down) is not pressed every few minutes in response to an audible click. If not unlocked in a minute or so with a complex password, the device halts to a disk encrypted state and unpowered ram, minimizing the windo…
Instead of a personal key combo, a dongle with an OTP code. Both the dongle and the computer have accelerometer-bump-tilt-oh-fuck-support. A OTP has to be entered every 5 minutes, or a secure screen/dead sequence starts. Sudden accelerated movements or a lack of presence-detection would also start the sequence.
I once wrote a script to automatically lock my computer if I got too far away from it, back when I was wearing a bluetooth wristband.
I guess you could do the same, but shut down the computer instead.
Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops
#125Interesting. The site implicitly references the arrest of the Silk Road founder, using the alternative acronym "Department of Parks and Recreation". He was arrested by having his laptop literally yanked from under his fingertips in a public library.
Having a USB kill switch in this case could (would?) have escalated the arrest method to something more violent.
Why? Was he a violent criminal?
Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops
#126Looks like "security LARPers" are at it again. I'd bet 99% of buyers will self destruct their laptop themselves, by accidentally bumping into the cord.
And to think now, the same people are pushing the narrative how PGP is bad.
Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't it make sense to remove the battery on your laptop entirely? With a modified magsafe-like power cord any attempt to grab the machine hard-kills the system and RAM begins degrading immediately. Epoxy over the screw terminals would also delay an attacker long enough to prevent freezing the RAM with compressed air to try and dump RAM via an exploit kit.
>Epoxy over the screw terminals would also delay an attacker... Might as well go all in and epoxy the ram sticks/dimm slot assembly.
Aren't they already soldered in place in modern laptops?
Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Epoxy over the screw terminals would also delay an attacker... Might as well go all in and epoxy the ram sticks/dimm slot assembly.
Would it cause overheating?
You don't have to douse the whole thing with expoxy. The dimm assembly looks like this: https://guide-images.cdn.ifixit.com/igi/dpYyM4oeOLPPTdpF.hug...
Putting epoxy around the top and bottom edges (where the retention clips are) and the right edge (where the contacts are) should make it extremely difficult to dislodge, but not impact the thermal performance of the chips (the black rectangles).
Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops
#129Good to have if you run a dark net marketplace or a political disident ring from public libraries. An additional refinement is to autolock the device if a certain personal key combo (ex. Shit - vol up - vol down) is not pressed every few minutes in response to an audible click. If not unlocked in a minute or so with a complex password, the device halts to a disk encrypted state and unpowered ram, minimizing the windo…
The combo solution is not good enough, especially if you are in public. If you can be observed to use the combo (which you would have to be using regularly) somebody else could be pressing the combo or they could insert USB device that can generate the combo regularly. I would also add that locking your laptop is not safe enough if you are serious about this. There are devices that can exfiltrate information from wha…
> There are devices that can exfiltrate information from what I understand almost every operating system through USB.
If that is true, then it is a vulnerability. You should file bug reports.
Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops
#130Windows: Sorry, Dave, we can't shut your system down right now, you have 3 apps keeping it from shutting down and we have 37 updates to Edge Browser to install... Have a nice day.
That's what the -9 flag is for.