this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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Would this be difficult to actually put together? Asking as a mostly casual user of technology and of course for purely academic purposes.
Depends if the phone is supposed to still work.
If you just take an empty shell it shouldn't be hard at all to put an USB killer inside.
If you want to keep a functional phone, that's very difficult. You'd likely have to reduce the size of the battery by half to free some space and then design a custom USB killer to fit into that space. And then you need some kind of switch to switch between regular USB usage and USB killer mode. Or you just hard-wire it to USB killer only and charge your phone exclusively with wireless charging.
That feels really insightful.
Saw this post earlier and was cranking some brain cycles in kinda the same way you were. My brain settled on a switch for the USB since you should just need a 5 pole/2 throw switch (think I'm using those terms correctly?) to go from regular USB function to kill mode. I think for my own peace of mind, I'd want it to be 3 throw though (normal, completely unconnected, and kill). My brain then went to the battery, which I see as the real design constraint.
Then I got to thinking about building it into a phone case. The case would need to plug in to your phone's USB port, then have an additional external connection; it would be this connection that is switched into normal/nothing/kill mode. Cases can be pretty bulky, so tucking a battery into there would be easier and still maybe evade detection.
All that said, I think I like your idea better.
Edit: spelling
Edit 2: additional thought: if you went with the case, you'd want to have it really difficult to remove. Like, requiring undoing some screws, especially if you can get some torx or other niche screw head design (bonus points for mix and matched screw heads).
My thoughts on that are that even if the case is identified as having a false port on it, it would be so difficult to remove that the "adversary" just plugs their info stealer into it anyway.
The USB killer doesn't need a battery of its own. It charges capacitors from the USB supply voltage and then spikes a high-voltage discharge into the USB power pins. So you'd only need to change the battery to a smaller one to give you space for the USB killer. The battery is the only component on your phone that's reasonably easy to shrink while still retaining the phone's functionality (though obviously with reduced battery capacity).