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A Lock Picking Game Changer [video]
- hirundo 6y agoIt's a little device sold by the guy who made the video that makes much of his hard-earned muscle memory for lock picking unnecessary. It doesn't replicate his thousands of hours of training but it goes a long way. It also wouldn't take an Eli Whitney to turn it into an automated gadget that works as a universal key for the most common locks. This channel does the great service of convincingly demonstrating how poorly most locks secure against a skilled attacker. And that the skill threshold is rapidly decreasing.
- anonporridge 6y agoThe most important general takeaway I have is that you can't rely purely on passive security. No matter how elaborate your designs, someone will always find a way in given enough incentive. And given enough time, a tricky, narrow exploit gets widened into a highway. Security is a red queen. You have to run fast just to stay in the same place.
- capableweb 6y ago> No matter how elaborate your designs, someone will always find a way in given enough incentive I'd reverse it. When you realize you need "security" you can't just focus on one or two aspects. You have to figure out what you need security from. A padlock won't stop the government of course, but it will stop a teenager who wouldn't want to leave any trace of breaking it nor know how to pick locks. Just like storing your cryptocurrencies on a hardware device might protect it against phishing attacks or other technological attacks but it won't stop someone from grabbing you in person and threatening you with a hammer. For that you need physical protection. So unless you know who you're protecting yourself/your thing against, you won't be able to know what security you really need.
- kube-system 6y agoi.e. "threat model" Be weary of anyone who makes security recommendations without first qualifying their audience's threat model. Unless they understand what they're trying to protect against, it's simply opinionated guesswork, and could even be counterproductive.
- mgarfias 6y agoI guess my dog is “active” security then.
- bawolff 6y agoYes, that very literally is active security.
- fanatic2pope 6y agoDepends on the dog. Years ago I had a black lab who slept peacefully right through an entire burglary. They even had to step over him to get to my CD collection.
- mgarfias 6y agoI’ve got a pack of shepherds. They are all quite active. Even the old guy
- NicoJuicy 6y agoThere's a whistle that scares all dogs.
- falcolas 6y ago> And that the skill threshold is rapidly decreasing. Especially when you consider how many locks (esp. high tech locks) are vulnerable to low skill attacks (rapping, shimming, magnets).
- Arainach 6y ago>It also wouldn't take an Eli Whitney to turn it into an automated gadget that works as a universal key for the most common locks. These have existed for a while. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKZ_vJDMJ9A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKZ_vJDMJ9A The mechanism isn't quite the same, but that's because for most common locks, if you're building a machine you don't need pin-by-pin picking.
- ineedasername 6y agoCorrect, lishi picks are great for single pin picking, and I suspect it might allow dealing with security pins much easier than a pick gun. Such guns are somewhat similar to raking techniques, which are not great with security pins.
- SavantIdiot 6y agoI first read about these in a book called "How to get Anything on Anybody" that I bought from the Paladin Press in 1983. They're from the 50's, I believe, and haven't changed much.
- ineedasername 6y agoThe limitation of turning it into a general tool for common locks is the shape of the keyway. There are multiple versions required because the contours keys can vary significantly. Similarly, these tools feature the ability to decode the lock so you can actually use the information to make a duplicate of a key without the key itself. A single tool wouldn't do that because the pin lengths can vary for different lock types, and sometimes the distance between pins. However, something like a pick gun can server pretty well for a wide variety of locks, with the limitation that they lose some efficacy when a lock has security pins.
- yeneek 6y agoI bought pick gun long time ago and was pretty disapointed. Pick gun need wide keyhole. Most locks I encountered had zig zag keyhole.
- ineedasername 6y agoYeah, pick guns aren't great for even medium security locks or paracentric keyways. Standard schlage, kwikset, yale... They aren't too bad. But any of their models that allow them to be re-keyed by the end user generally don't use pin & tumbler designs so raking it and pick guns are useless.
- ashtonkem 6y agoWhat’s fascinating is that it doesn’t seem to matter; most thefts in the US appear to be the result of something be completely unsecured, or via brute force. Chances are someone is far more likely to break your window than pick your lock. The only ones that really bother me are the firearm locks. A distressingly large percentage of firearm locks he talks about can be opened in seconds by an untrained teenager, which seems incredibly bad to me.
- LeifCarrotson 6y agoThe other distressing problem with lockpicking and especially with firearm locks is that a significant part of their security model relies on obscurity. To be professionally effective, a locksmith must know a lot of trivia about dozens of locks, and you can make that hundreds or thousands if they want to expand to gun safes and bike locks and cars and on and on... For that purpose, the plethora of cheap options is a decent deterrent. No normal burglar is likely to have specialized skills in opening dozens of locks. But in a targeted attack, if you give any teenager a chance to look at the lock, then a few days to go on the Internet and see someone trivially jiggling the wafer core open, maybe buy an identical lock for $10 and practice their skills, none of the basic products are likely to be effective.
- stainforth 6y agoSecurity by obscurity or security by variety better yet?
- danmur 6y agoObscurity through variety :)
- hellbannedguy 6y agoA center punch to the driver's window welcomed me to San Francisco. I got a $20 radio, and left my truck unlocked, with a sign. The sign read, "Nap in the back of my truck. Use the seat to rest, but please don't break anything else." Never happened again, and for a week someone was leaving a $10 in my glove box. Crazy? I drive an old Toyota Truck, and most of you have nicer cars. Oh yea, I did put a kill switch in the truck.
- justaj 6y ago> how poorly most locks secure against a skilled attacker. So which are some of the locks that secure better than most locks?
- GekkePrutser 6y agoI don't think it's made by him, it's got a picture of Mao Zedong on it and the guy sounds pretty American. I think he just sources them from China?
- larrydag 6y agoThese lock picking tools are getting so easy. I expect new types of locks, probably electronic, will be coming out soon in market.
- Quequau 6y agoGiven how many of this man's videos contain the phrase "This security flaw has been known for [n] decades" I would not hold my breath. Also, given how many electronic locks he features which are total garbage I would not buy one of those for most use cases.
- anonporridge 6y agoWell known by a relatively tiny group of mostly engineers, lock smiths, and hobbyists vs widely available on a 3 million subscriber Youtube channel are very different degrees of broken. When EVERY random teenager can easily access these tools and learn these tricks, it's liable to start causing some larger scale problems that could indeed force change in the industry.
- Judgmentality 6y ago> When EVERY random teenager can easily access these tools and learn these tricks, it's liable to start causing some larger scale problems that could indeed force change in the industry. This stuff has been publicly available for decades. I learned using the MIT Guide to Lock Picking from 1991, and bought a lockpicking set online, and off I went. Nowadays it's just easier and more accessible (like most things). https://www.lysator.liu.se/mit-guide/MITLockGuide.pdf https://www.lysator.liu.se/mit-guide/MITLockGuide.pdf
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoThe Anarchist Cookbook has been out for a while, its probably fine.
- Quequau 5y agoI don't know what more you could want. This guy has a YouTube channel with nearly 3 million subscribers and he's made nearly 1,300 hundred videos. There are dozens of subreddits focused on lock picking with hundreds of thousands of users. I am not sure what the definition of "every random teenager" really is but I can do web search and find and instructional video, it's good enough for my purposes. Many, maybe even most of his videos of locks made by companies who sell in common retail outlets demonstrate low skill attacks and still more demonstrate low effort / specialised knowledge attacks. He also has a web store where you can buy a bunch of tools for this. So even someone like me who has lost most of the use of my right hand can open many of the big name locks on the market without much difficulty. Most cases it's a web search to a video and perhaps next day delivery of a tool kit. Many times the attack is ridiculously trivial and can be done with stuff one might find in your average garage shop. I mean look at some of his videos... "open with a fork" "open with a shim made out of a coke can" "open with a strong magnet" "open with a lego figure" "open with a spoon" "open by raking with a rake lock pick" "open with a sharp blow with a small hammer" "open by drilling here" "open by grinding this part" "open with a pocket knife" "open with a butter knife" "open with the top of a bic pen"
- tyleo 6y agoThese look amazing! For anyone not aware: lock picking is already easy on most locks. I was locked out of a keyed door in my last apartment once and was able to pick my way back in with no experience, a friend's lock picking kit, and a few YouTube videos. The whole thing took less than 30 minutes. Since then I've thought of locks more like deterrent than bulletproof security.
- phkahler 6y ago>> Since then I've thought of locks more like deterrent than bulletproof security. Remember, a rock to the window will get someone into your house. A bolt cutter will take off small padlocks. So yes, most locks are there to protect from the casual or opportunistic thief. That doesn't mean we don't need the of course.
- tyleo 6y agoIndeed. I've also had to bolt cut my way into a storage unit I forgot the combination to. Bolt cutters could be rented from the local Home Depot and cut my way into my own storage unit with no knowledge from the staff. It was my lock so no damage to the owners.
- EricE 6y ago>Remember, a rock to the window will get someone into your house. Security films that dramatically up the ante on what it takes to go through windows are getting cheap and easy to install. If I had thought about it when I got my windows tinted a few years back I would have just had them added on, especially for my downstairs windows (not sure I would bother with most of the upstairs - I have no trees or easy access to most of them). There are many simple things you can do to dramatically up the ante on what it takes for someone to molest your stuff. A recent news story talked about people using coat hangers to trip emergency garage door releases so a quick re-security it with a zip tie that will break with a solid tug for it's real use, but be too hard to break with a wire from outside is all that was needed to close that "hole". Need a place to share this kind of stuff for homeowners. I recon it would probably be a small percentage but still a large number.
- 6y ago
- mazoro 6y agoWhat does the (supposedly) Chinese characters on the key say?
- jerrysievert 6y agolikely the name of gentleman who created them? http://www.originallishi.com/about-lishi-tools/ http://www.originallishi.com/about-lishi-tools/
- BugsJustFindMe 6y ago"Your server is running PHP version 5.4.45 but WordPress 5.7.1 requires at least 5.6.20." That's an interesting name!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jerrysievert 6y ago> “ Today’s Original Lishi tools are the brain child of Zhi Qin Li. These amazing tools were invented in early 2000 in response to the need to help his locksmith friends and his trainees.” Note that the picture on the sets are of him as well.
- aaroninsf 6y agoSold out atm.
- whydoineedthis 6y agoaaaaaaaaaand..it's sold out.
- mjs7231 6y agoA quick search for Lishi tools shows many sites selling them. At $80 each, the cost to tinker around is too high for me. AliExpress has what I assume to be terrible quality ones selling for about $40 each.
- yodon 6y agoIn California, anyone selling a lock pick needs to keep the driver's license number of the purchaser on file and available to police for a year. Other state by state laws on lock picks are at [0]. [0] https://toool.us/laws.html https://toool.us/laws.html
- capableweb 6y agoKing Louis XVI of France famously enjoyed both designing and picking various locks.
- travisjungroth 6y agoMy guess is the number of crimes that law has prevented or solved is very, very low.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y agoThey might catch the oceans 11 crew one day! Just you watch!
- yeneek 6y agoWe have no such law in Czechia. Burglars usually break locks or doors, it's quicker and works every time.
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoOne of the dumbest laws on the books.
- taftster 6y agoDirect link to the product page for this tool on his website. It wasn't hard to find, but took me a few page clicks: https://covertinstruments.com/collections/lishi-tools https://covertinstruments.com/collections/lishi-tools
- Benlights 6y agoI would not usually try and end run around someone selling a product, however he is sold out at the moment so I don't feel bad. These Lishi picks can be had on alibaba and aliexpress for about 1/3 to 1/2 the price he is selling them at https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/lishi-pick-set.html https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/lishi-pick-set.html https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=SB_20210503091118&SearchText=lishi https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=S...
- sneak 6y agoTFA is an ad. Linking to places with better prices isn't an "end run".
- sumnole 6y agoAli has been hit or miss for me. The deals are great, but sometimes products are not as described, the wrong product is shipped, or nothing gets delivered at all, and reaching customer service is not made easy.
- userbinator 6y agoThe name alone should be enough to convince anyone that these picks are from a Chinese company anyway (does anyone happen to know their official site?) Of course, there are likely to be clones.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y agoI'll have to consider the ethics that it's OKAY to steal from a Chinese company if the knockoffs are also Chinese. You do you. I have a product I designed, and produce, knocked off by a Chinese company and sold on Alibaba. Super Cool.
- pmarreck 6y agoWhile not judging anyone, buying cheaper from a country that does not have labor laws protecting its workers is IMHO tantamount to buying cheap cotton from southern landowners before Lincoln did his thing.
- LeegleechN 6y agoI bought a set of conventional lockpicks to try out the hobby, but it ended up being so easy it wasn't interesting! I was able to reach competence in a few hours and at that point I didn't want to spend a lot of money to find harder to pick locks or try to improve my speed further. At least it's a nice tactile thing to try out and a useful skill to have in your back packet in case you find yourself locked out of your house / bike / whatever.
- Animats 6y agoI bought a set of conventional lockpicks to try out the hobby, but it ended up being so easy it wasn't interesting! Ordinary pin-tumbler locks with some wear on them are embarrassingly easy to pick. Raking or bumping usually works. Just apply some tension and stick in something that lets you move the pins. There's a marketing reason for this. If you design a lock that wears out into a locked condition, customers eventually get locked out and are angry. If you design a lock that wears into an easier to unlock condition, customers don't notice.
- bawolff 6y agoIsn't that true of every hobby? Video games are pretty boring if you don't go past pong, etc.
- mfkp 6y agoJust make sure that it's not a felony to have them "in your back pocket" in your state or jurisdiction: http://lockwiki.com/index.php/Legal_issues http://lockwiki.com/index.php/Legal_issues
- kenhwang 6y agoAgreed, it's way too easy for most locks to be interesting as a hobby, but to jump to pick-resistant locks is a huge increase in skill that I never made it past. So I just treat it as a useful skill to have in emergencies. I leave a set of picks in my cars' glove compartments and a very crude set (a very basic tensioner and a bunch of hairpins) in my yard. Has come in handy a couple of times when I've locked myself out.
- nomel 6y ago
- aidenn0 6y agoELI 5: why do most locks not have security (spool, mushroom, &c) pins? Those are absolutely harder for a beginner to pick, and also provide a measure of security against bumping.
- jstanley 6y agoBecause almost no burglaries are down to locks being picked. Even cheap locks are good enough that in most installations they are not the weak link.
- doikor 6y agoThey cost money. The less security features you put in the bigger the manufacturers cut. edit: And there are a lot good lock companies producing quality locks. They just cost like $100 (and way more for doors. A quality abloy lockbody and the stuff on the frame is like $300+ without work) for a lock while a cheap one costs like $5. Though expensive does not mean good some are just scams so be careful/read up on what you are buying. And still even these good ones are pickable just require hundreds or thousands of hours (and specialized tools) to become good enough to do it reliably instead of 5 minutes. And for doors once you put a quality lock on it you need a skilled worker to properly install both the lock and the door. Look up some physical pen testing videos online how shitty installs the worlds is full of. Basically you can get in through so many doors with a small piece of scrap plastic. Also once you get a really good lock a locksmith (or pretty much anyone for that matter) will not be able to pick it. So if you lose your keys it will have to be broken and then you are out your expensive $100+ lock.
- lowbloodsugar 6y agoMy eldest teenager took about a day to learn how to pick these locks. It's just not that hard.
- snet0 6y agoI'm curious: do people expect mechanical locks such as these to continue being used in the future? 20 years? 50 years? I'm kind of imagining that at some point, someone will "solve" locks, and create a physical equivalent of RSA. I expect that mechanical solutions will be too cost-prohibitive, so is the only route for progress through electronic lock systems? From a few videos on this channel, it looks pretty dire for those, but perhaps the incentive isn't there yet.
- foobarian 6y agoIt's fun to point out to laypeople how insecure the mechanical locks are, and how easy they are to pick. But it's less often mentioned that this is a desirable feature; imagine bulletproof locks - what would the recommendation be to people who get locked out? What would the economic damage be across the board?
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoYou cut it
- snet0 6y agoI think this is kind of central to what a perfect lock would be. The only non-authorised access should be destructive.
- kube-system 6y agoWhile there are some locks that attempt to do stuff like this (Bowley locks?), the trade off for perfection is cost and recoverability. This might be useful for niche use-cases or academic reasons, but for a commercial product, the value proposition doesn't make as much sense. After a certain point of pick/bypass resistance, adding cost to a lock isn't actually protecting most users from any plausible attacker. And is more likely to prevent the authorized user from gaining access in a lockout scenario than it is to prevent a real-world attack. In most cases where someone faces a sophisticated attacker that could bypass a security lock, you'd be better served by layering other security techniques, instead of putting your eggs all in one basket with the physical lock.
- Animats 6y agoThose have been around for years, but mostly for car locks. You need a specific one for each kind of lock. They cost about US$40-$80 each, and a full set is maybe 50 of them. For car locks, the make and model of the car tells you which one to use. For door locks, you have to go look at the lock and recognize the keyway, or try different ones. So they're more useful for automotive. They're really a key recovery tool - you can read out the lock and make a key, as Lock Picking Lawyer does. He has a old manual key originating machine where you can hand-cut a key with specific notches. There are newer CNC machines for that.[1] [1] https://keyline.it/en/electronic-key-cutting-machines https://keyline.it/en/electronic-key-cutting-machines
- jokoon 6y agoI've read stories on reddit of people picking locks of hotel or motels to sleep free of charge. I'm wondering what kind of victim free stuff one can easily get away with by picking locks.
- timonoko 6y agoNoticed recently that even Cheap Chinese bicycle locks are now "dimple" locks. People do understand now that these "american"-style pin locks are quite useless, as opening them is everyman's sport. In dimple lock the key goes in sideways, and if the keyway is tight enuff, you cannot make a rake to fit in. Also you can design the keyway so that you cannot flip them dimples from side channel with a "flag" pick.
- DigiDigiorno 6y agoThere are rakes and picks for dimple locks. (And I don't think any dimple lock has won the tolerance game on keyways for mass produced locks) Dimple locks are just less common. The more common they become and more common you'll see the rakes and picks made for them. Despite the flags being very easy to make yourself, they're uncommon enough that if you buy them from a pick store you pay a niche premium. I will say a product is more likely to be secure if the manufacturer is intentionally choosing a rarer style simply because they are taking security into account
- timonoko 6y agoI found a bicycle dimple lock last week on the street. I find it impossible to pick open. The dimple row is so tight that you can fit only straight blade in, raking is impossible. I have been making flags, but it seems to be impossible to find right curved shape so that the pin is fully movable. Also I have made a narrow blade for my Lock Pick Gun, but all in vain. Soon I have to send this bloody lock to Lock Picking Lawyer, situation is so desperate.
- e12e 6y agoI had to look up an example: https://youtu.be/DcZVxP6lTrE https://youtu.be/DcZVxP6lTrE I guess I can see how they might be made to tighter tolerances and tighter keyways.
- timonoko 6y agoYes. This is the wide-mouth dimple lock where you can use flag and rake. Those see-through training locks you can get from Alibaba are also of that type. You can even use regular rakes on those by rotating them slightly.
- 089723645897236 6y agoso Lockpicking Lawyer is a badass and has way more tool time than me. But lockpicking is surprisingly easy. He does it precisely and slowly, but it can be done much more aggressively and with less thought. Individually manipulating the pins is great but turns out aggressive imprecise raking works too, especially on cheaper locks. Lots of techniques out there.
- ygra 5y agoHe demonstrates a lot of lower-skill attacks in various videos, showing pretty convincingly that against a lot of locks (even some more expensive ones where the manufacturer cut corners) they are effective and much quicker than single-pin picking. That includes raking, shimming, simply using force, etc.
- yabones 6y agoThere is no such thing as a lock. There are only timers accelerated by skilled attackers. Same goes for encryption. Your AES-256 is great today, fine tomorrow, and probably broken in 10 years.
- cosmodisk 6y agoSome time ago I did purchase a lockpick kit to play around with ot for a bit. The tools in the video seem to be a useful help for beginners,but ultimately they need to develop that intimate feel of where exactly the tool is in the lock and what's going on there. Slight slips, movements,and other indicators are very important to the over success of lockpicking.
- canada_dry 6y agoNot long ago - just to see if it would work - I designed and 3D printed a replacement key. It worked. It wouldn't be too difficult to McGyver something similar to a lishi using 3D printing with a thin metal insert.
- timonoko 6y agoRobert De Niro's Snapper was the game changer in 1988. https://youtu.be/HUcZEX5RkzU https://youtu.be/HUcZEX5RkzU . Looked amazing but it was true. You can really open every door in America within seconds.