I wonder what makes it take a minimum of 0.7s per combo, it seems like it could be sped up substantially.
Further, while standing somewhere for five minutes may be obvious in some situations, there are many cases in which it wouldn't be obvious at all, or the response time would be great enough that this could still be quite useful to bad guys.
Finally, "security through counting on slow hardware" is probably even worse than security through obscurity.
Even if the person is stone guilty I don’t think the police should be willy nilly destroying property in the process of serving a warrant.
I know much of the focus is rightly on increasing accountability for the damage done to humans, but I always cringe at the thought of how much damage they can cause while performing a search. Imagine if your kid, or roommate had a warrant and they came in, smashed all your drywall and left you with the bill.
The fact that law enforcement isn't responsible for damages during a search is problematic. When it's done somewhere when they've screwed up the address is even worse. "oops, sorry" should not be enough.
Besides being for fun, the main draw seems to be that it picks the lock _and_ gives you the bitting. So if you lose all your keys, your locksmith is now in and can easily remake keys without swapping out the lock core.
There may be cases were it's (much) cheaper to pay a locksmith to stand there for ten minutes and spend a few minutes at a key machine, rather than pick a lock in 30 seconds and spend 10 minutes installing a $100 high end lock cylinder.
Law enforcement can use pick guns, which will open a large majority of door locks, if they don't want to just use a battering ram for some reason.
There are a ton of legitimate reasons to use lock picks, though - being able to use a pair of paperclips, or office supplies, can get you into network cabinets in a pinch, or if you lock your keys in your house or car and have a pick kit in your wallet. If a friend has an emergency and they know you can do it, it can save locksmith fees. Kids can lose keys in astonishing ways.
And the hobby is fun - it's manual dexterity, skill, obscure technical knowledge, and you gain an appreciation for all the lockpicking content out there, and get to see the brazen plot devices when movies portray lockpicking in ridiculous ways. There are engineering attempts at creating unpickable locks with some awesome youtube videos, with engineering geeks creating elaborate locks and shipping them to the lockpickinglawyer or other content creators.
It's also important from an educational standpoint. Knowing how secure you are is important, because assumptions can lead to tragic results. If you have a glass door, it doesn't matter if you've got a million dollar unpickable lock. If you know how trivial it is to open most padlocks, and what form factors of locks are most susceptible, you can make better decisions about securing storage units, trailers, outdoor gates, bikes, and so forth.
A device like this is a novelty, not a serious security threat, and I'd argue the threshold for building it exceeds the threshold for which there are a thousand other trivially accessible ways of bypassing a given lock. There are tools similar to this device in spirit, in which you set pins for a key type manually with the key inserted, and with a little practice, will get you through a door in under a minute.
Start here and enjoy! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm9K6rby98W8JigLoZOh6FQ
I see comments like these all the time on Reddit and Hackernews. Hackers are like, "locks aren't security, a sledgehammer breaks them" and it appears to betray a mental threat model of "what if the cops want my thing" and never "what if someone wishes to do me harm while I am in my house" or "what if a criminal wants to not get caught taking my things" or "what if someone wants to lie in wait in my house", which are not risks to these commenters. They are to a lot of people though.
This isn’t the movies. 99% of the time people need their own lock picked because they lost they key
- lock picking hobbist
- snap gun
- sledgehammer
And you simplified their comment to "locks aren't security because a sledgehammer breaks them" then proceeded to describe threat models where a sledgehammer doesn't work in detail. It's not a very constructive discussion.
Easy picks can mess with that. If I can open this with my tools in two shakes of a lamb's tail because the tolerances are far too big probably that guard doesn't notice, whereas if I'm there heaving and grimacing for ten minutes, or I need a sledgehammer or an angle grinder, they'd have to be completely moronic not to realise I'm not on the up-and-up.
Security through locks doesn't work in the first place. At least not locks that can be picked by this robot. Pick gun is a thing.
[0] Blog about it: https://joeleb.com/safe-cracking-robot-defcon/
[1] Defcon video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9vIcfLrmiA
Somewhat less impressive than I was expecting. The wire idea is neat though.
Two of them in total, if I counted right.
JKCalhoun•1h ago
Maybe like this wild machine: https://youtu.be/CLcOZhq2GjQ?si=LJktKRzeHPRyXcXR&t=155