Thread by @doctorow

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.

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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.

toool.us

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.114…

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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.

cacm.acm.org/news/246744-pi…

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The actual inference part works really reliably! Here's Ramesh demoing the technique:



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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.

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Speaking as an author of technothrillers, this is a fantastic bit. (attn: @jonrog1).

What's more, it dispenses with the need for lockpicking altogether: obtain an advance recording, infer the key, make the key, enter the premises.

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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.

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If you want to learn lockpicking (and I think you should try!), I recommend the picks and practice locks from @SparrowsTools, which have never steered me wrong.

sparrowslockpicks.com

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