USB Armory Mk II, a Swiss Army Knife for Security Applications

Inverse Path, an F-Secure company, has released an open source, flash drive-sized Linux computer designed from the ground up with information security in mind.

Meet the USB Armory Mk II, a small (measuring at 66 mm x 19 mm x 8 mm without its enclosure) yet powerful board. It can be used for a plethora of different security applications, including as a Tor Bridge, VPN router, Hardware Security Module (HSM), OpenSSH client and agent for untrusted hosts, portable penetration testing platform, automatically encrypted mass storage device, password manager, digital wallet, and much more.

This isn’t Inverse Path’s first attempt at a computer built with security in mind either. Before they were bought by F-Secure, Inverse Path released the USB Armory Mk I back in 2015. However, the USB Armory Mk II is full of upgrades such as a modern USB-C port, a reprogrammable u-blox ANNA-B112 Bluetooth 5 module, an efficient NXP i.MX6ULZ Arm Cortex-A7 processor, and 16 GB of dedicated eMMC storage.

The USB Armory Mk II USB-C design allowed Inverse Path to also create a companion Mk II Debug Board. This debug accessory board enables easy access to the serial console and 8x GPIO connections (I²C, SPI, UART). Both the USB Armory Mk II and Mk II Debug board have recently launched on Crowd Supply and they have already surpassed their $20,000 funding goal after a few hours.

The USB Armory Mk II has a price tag of $149 for a single unit. Shipping begins December 30th, 2019.