Locks are pretty rubbish. The lock on your door is more of a “keep out” sign than an actual way to keep someone who wants to get in from coming in. My daughter was 5 or 6 when I first took her to Defcon and she learned to pick locks in an hour.
So can you! Try Toool, The Open Organization of Lockpickers, and go to town. It’s a super fun, soothing way to pass the day. Like knitting, but simultaneously more and less practical.
Once you’ve learned to pick locks, you get a profound realization about security: there are billion-dollar companies whose products are just GARBAGE and always have been, who, despite this, have been in business for decades or even centuries.
You also realize why: security is hard. Making locks that can be easily opened with a key, not easily opened without the key, can be serviced and mass produced? That’s just hard.
Moreover, the materiality of locks - the fact that they’re made from STUFF, and that STUFF has its own characteristics, flaws and behaviors, makes those problems a million times gnarlier.
For years, we’ve known that amateur lockpickers can reproduce your keys by taking pictures of them. There are even grocery store machines that take a picture of your key and duplicate it. The shape of your key is itself a security vulnerability.
But it turns out it’s not just the SHAPE of your key, it’s the SOUND. Spikey is an exploit from a NUS Comp Sci team lead by Soundarya Ramesh, laid out in this (paywalled) ACM Hotmobile paper.
Spikey is an acoustic attack on traditional six-pin locks. It analyzes a sound recording of a key entering the keyway and hitting the pins and infers what the key must look like based on the sounds.
The hard part isn’t the analysis, it’s obtaining the recording. You need to get a smartphone to within a few centimeters of the key as it enters the lock, which is pretty obvious. On the other hand, it may be possible to capture the audio by hacking a “smart” doorbell’s mic.
Speaking as an author of technothrillers, this is a fantastic bit. (attn: John Rogers).
What’s more, it dispenses with the need for lockpicking altogether: obtain an advance recording, infer the key, make the key, enter the premises.
Ramesh speculates that a generic defense against this attack can be found in subtle alterations in the geometry of the key - by making the ridges smoother, it could dampen the sounds they make when hitting the pins, frustrating attempts to infer the pin configuration.
If you want to learn lockpicking (and I think you should try!), I recommend the picks and practice locks from Sparrows Tools, which have never steered me wrong.
