Killing Me Slowly With His Bus...

A month or so ago, I came across BusKill, a device that seems like a neat way to protect your data in the event of abrupt theft. The basic premise is that an intentionally-weak physical tether between your laptop and your person gets broken when a thief snatches your laptop and runs off, triggering an immediate system shutdown (or even destruction of your sensitive data). Admittedly, this solution might feel like overkill for many folks, but it's a neat one, IMO, and the folks behind it have made the hardware and software both open (license info here). Love that.

The physical tether BusKill uses is a magnetic USB "breakaway" connector, which got me thinking about the magnetic USB connectors I use for a number of my personal devices. Specifically, using one of those for a cheap BK-like solution.

Behold! A simple solution with a $8 magnetic USB-C connector (plus USB-C-to-A cable I had lying around and an old ASUS USB Bluetooth module I wasn't using):

I wrangled this with some simple python code to monitor for USB events --like disconnect-- and it works pretty well to promptly shutdown my Ubuntu 24.04 VM when I break the USB connection:

 

 

Bonus points if one were to use their hardware security key (like a YubiKey) as the tethered USB device, so that if a thief WERE to grab the laptop and run, said thief would also not get the hardware security key. :)