usbkill waits for a change on your USB ports, then immediately turns
off your computer without prompts or signaling other open applications.
Depending on your point of view, it's an un-clean shutdown and may
trigger fsck or other file integrity checks on re-start even though
the poweroff signal syncs open files to disk first.
It works on Mac OS X and Ubuntu.
To run:
sudo usbkill.shTry adding usbkill.sh to your /etc/rc.local. Any USB device
changes not whitelisted in /etc/usbkill/settings will cause your
computer to shutdown.
Unlike the
original Python-based version,
this Bash version does not require any additional programs like
python3 or lsusb to be installed.
This is for the security paranoid - if law enforcement surprises you or confiscates your laptop from you when you are at a public library.
- Law enforcement will use a mouse jiggler to keep the screensaver and sleep mode from activating. If someone inserts a mouse jiggler, it would be much more secure for the laptop to immediately turn off, re-protecting all your data with your whole-disk encryption. You can also use this as a kill switch by quickly removing a USB device to turn the computer off and prevent cold boot attacks on RAM.
- Blocking unauthorized USB devices prevents installing backdoors or malware on your computer or to retrieve documents from your computer via USB.
The usbkill daemon monitors for devices that are inserted since it started running and for devices that were removed since it started.
A settings file at /etc/usbkill/settings can be configured to use a
list of whitelisted USB devices so that you may still use an external
mouse or USB storage device you trust. The check interval can also be
modified - the default is to check every second.
Make sure to use whole-disk encryption! Otherwise, your adversary will just re-start the computer and make a copy of all your files.
Bash can trap signals to close usbkill, however a kill -9 probably
won't get trapped. The other signals could still be trapped
and cause the computer to shutdown when the script is signaled to close.
Unfortunately, this can cause your computer to always have an unclean
shutdown since a normal shutdown would still signal the script to close
and thereby cause a premature poweroff event.
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