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BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops

buskill.in

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Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops

#291

Post by gambiting »

Someone wrote: post #288
arpa wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is why you should actually have "signs of life" and something _slightly_ illegal on your plausible deniability partition. Just enough dirt to get you into trouble, but not too much trouble. If you're squeeky clean, you get the rubber hose cryptography treatment.

If you want those signs of life to be convincing, it should include all kinds of history without long gaps, such as: - email, including recently received and sent emails - web browser history - system logs - software updates In practice, I think it’s impossible to do that. If the police discovers, for example, that your system logs show your machine was off for a week, but they also just saw you reset it, what do you…

>>but they also just saw you reset it, what do you tell them?

That you're not a computer expert and have no idea why your computer wasn't keeping logs correctly?

Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops

#292

Post by marvin »

danbruc wrote: post #21
marvin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would a more violent arrest have solved anything?

Instead of moving the laptop you move the user. Unless the kill switch is connected to the user or you remove the user too slowly and allow them to manually trigger the kill switch, you may gain access to the laptop.

That's a very interesting proposition that looks completely insane to my European eyes, but I can certainly understand the philosophy behind it.

So the premise is that if using kill-switches becomes common among criminals, we can expect suspects in computer crime cases to be apprehended in ways such as unexpectedly being hit in the head with blunt force trauma, gassed with anesthesics or similar violence. Seems like it would challenge some pretty central democratic principles!

Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops

#293

Post by darkarmani »

mnsc wrote: post #44

Am I the only one to think that if someone is close enough to physically yank your computer out of your hands they are also physically close enough to beat you with a wrench if you lock the computer containing what they are after? https://xkcd.com/538/

What percentage of the time are you dealing with thieves versus physical assailants? The lock screen seems to be for more casual users. The shred the filesystem is for hard-core users that will get beat harder if the assailant finds evidence.

Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops

#294

Post by fencepost »

arpa wrote: post #261
Linosaurus wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> perfectly plausible deniability The paranoid dystopian counterpart is that you cannot prove you don't have a second partition either. Might get awkward if someone decided to compel the second password on less solid evidence. If you're not actually using the feature.

this is why you should actually have "signs of life" and something _slightly_ illegal on your plausible deniability partition. Just enough dirt to get you into trouble, but not too much trouble. If you're squeeky clean, you get the rubber hose cryptography treatment.

Ah, the magical porn partition.

Level of kink up to you.

Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops

#295

Post by detaro »

Linosaurus wrote: post #234
gambiting wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truecrypt had this exact function - one password would decrypt your drive sort of on one end, and start the OS there, another password would decrypt the drive on the other end, and start the OS installed there - so you always had perfectly plausible deniability, since the drive taken as a whole looked like a completely normal encrypted drive(in fact you could accidentally destroy the hidden partition by overwriting "…

> perfectly plausible deniability The paranoid dystopian counterpart is that you cannot prove you don't have a second partition either. Might get awkward if someone decided to compel the second password on less solid evidence. If you're not actually using the feature.

There was a case here in Germany where the police report revealed that they apparently spent a lot of time looking for evidence of a hidden partition/encrypted data etc because a PC owned by single man with zero evidence of porn was unusual. (but didn't find anything in the end, and didn't claim anything they didn't have evidence for)

Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops

#297

Post by maltfield »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #296

USB-C? or just USB-A only? Us mac folks from the era of no-USB-A are curious.

USB-C is easier. There's tons of magnetic breakaway cables to build your own USB-C BusKill. See the documentation:

* https://docs.buskill.in/buskill-app/en/stable/hardware_dev/i...

The reason this campaign is limited to USB-A is because there's no USB-A magnetic breakaway cables on the market.

* https://buskill.in/buy

Please support the campaign to make it available to folks who need USB-A BusKill cables.

Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops

#298

Post by MrStonedOne »

maltfield wrote: post #193
comeonseriously wrote: post #84

Windows: 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.

Currently the BusKill app just locks the screen when the cable disconnects. I've never had Windows block the screen lock with such an error. The way we implemented the self-destruct (currently only available in Linux), it locks the screen before attempting to wipe the LUKS Header. I imagine we'll do something similar in Windows, so the worst-case would be the soft shutdown hangs but at-least the screen is locked imme…

bluescreen is a good method, but produces a memory dump.

shutdown -s -t 0 -f will force the shutdown, but user has to be admin even if they could otherwise shutdown the computer.

Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops

#299

Post by serverlessmom »

Me, a person with no real use for this product but still interested: "Wow this is a great idea! I'll investigate!" Me, a clumsy person watching the video: "Oh no,"

In all seriousness though, I can see how this product could be useful to someone in very specific circumstances and is also an interesting idea.

Re: BusKill – A USB kill cord for laptops

#300

Post by MonaroVXR »

serverlessmom wrote: post #299

Me, a person with no real use for this product but still interested: "Wow this is a great idea! I'll investigate!" Me, a clumsy person watching the video: "Oh no," In all seriousness though, I can see how this product could be useful to someone in very specific circumstances and is also an interesting idea.

What about Uber that did this kill switch thing and could immediately "hide" the data?
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