Journalists, activists and human rights defenders face a constant battle to keep files safe from a growing set of digital threats and surveillance. But physical attacks can be challenging to defend against, whether an opportunist snatch-and-grab thief or an oppressive government kicking down someone’s door.
This week, a project called BusKill launched a custom USB magnetic breakaway cable that acts as a “dead man’s switch,” locking a computer if someone physically snatches it and severs the magnetic connectors.
BusKill has been in the works for more than two years as a do-it-yourself project. Anyone with the hardware could compile the source code, but it only worked on Linux and components quickly sold out.
After a crowdsourcing effort, the cable is now available to buy starting at $59 and has an accompanying app that works on macOS, Windows and Linux, allowing the person using the cable to easily arm and disarm the cable with a touch of a button.
“Most people aren’t handling top-secret documents from whistleblowers and worried about the secret police knocking down their doors, but that’s the level of risk that I designed BusKill for,” the project’s creator Michael Altfield told TechCrunch. “And I wanted it to be accessible to journalists who don’t necessarily use Linux and don’t know how to use the CLI [command line interface].”
BusKill is designed to lock your computer when it’s physically separated from you, but Linux users can further configure the app to trigger a self-destruct command, which scrambles the device’s cryptographic keys, rendering the computer’s data inaccessible in just a few seconds.
The project also plans to release triggers that shut down a computer when the magnetic cable is severed.
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Although Altfield said BusKill was designed with journalists and activists in mind, the cable can also protect the computers of travelers on vacation and other high-risk users, like crypto traders.
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