BusKill

A USB kill cord for your laptop

May 01, 2023

Project update 21 of 26

3D Printable BusKill Prototypes

by Michael Altfield

We’re happy to announce that we’ve had good progress on the design of the 3D printable BusKill USB-A magnetic breakaway couplers this year!

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, disassemble-able, 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 our latest update, 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.

Iterate with us!

If you have access to a 3D Printer, you have basic EE experience, or you’d like to help us test our 3D printable BusKill prototype, please let us know. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and we’re eager to finish-off this 3D printable BusKill prototype to help make this security-critical tool accessible to more people world-wide!

..Or buy an assembled cable

If 3D printing isn’t your thing, you can purchase a BusKill cable from Crowd Supply for yourself or a loved one. Funding from cable purchases goes to continued development of the BusKill project, and you get your own BusKill cable to keep you or your loved ones safe.


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