6 ms·

The Document Which Was Formerly Called The MIT Guide to Lockpicking

275 points by jamesbritt 15y ago

cleverjake 15y ago
For those interested in the back story... Back in the 40-60s(ish) people who are now commonly referred to as "hackers" were getting their start in the MIT Tech Model Rail Road club. They would get together and build model trains and tracks and hack together really neat ideas (neat if you're into trains at least). A lot of these same people were involved in the computer program, as well as general security. Lockpicking was sort of a game between a lot of the students as a way to hack their way into systems, just not in a digital sense. Many of them actually took mail in classes to become certified locksmiths just to get the special tools that were only legally allowed to be sold to locksmiths. In Stephen Levy's "Hackers", there is even a story of how the school bought a new military grade safe to keep components in the computer lab safe from prying eyes, but the installer forgot to leave a key. One of the students that the safe was supposed to keep out was asked to pick the lock, and did so with relative ease.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
jevinskie 15y ago
Locksport is a ton of fun! You can make your own starter set consisting of a hook pick and a tension wrench with nothing but a bench grinder and some hacksaw blades. With that pick, you can learn the basics of picking and (given patience) actually pick most any lock.
wtn 15y ago
The author could run this through spellcheck…
DiabloD3 15y ago
The MIT Guide to Lockpicking isn't about lock picking, its about how to think as a successful programmer. At least, thats how I've always viewed it.
- barrkel 15y ago
  If you want to extrapolate a more abstract lesson, I'd say it's less about thinking like a successful programmer and more about learning how to tackle problems while not following the "rules" of the problems. For example, a lock might have very sophisticated mushroom pins to avoid normal lock-picking techniques, and if you "play by the rules" with a normal tension wrench and simple pick, it may take you a long time - or it might never work. But on the other side, a sharp knock on the pins with a bump key refuses to play this game, and requires a different countermeasure for the lock. It's about looking at the whole boundary area of the problem, rather than the generally accepted one.
logjam 15y ago
My last encounter with Richard Feynman was not long before he died. Richard and Carl ate dinner with Julie and me at our house. We spent the rest of the evening practicing lock picking with locks from my rather extensive collection. I still sorely miss my friend, Richard Feynman. When thinking about interesting ideas, from either physics or computation, I often ask myself, "What would Feynman think of this?" -- Gerald Jay Sussman, MIT AI Lab, co-author of SICP
jwingy 15y ago
I'm going to study this and use it. Not for malicious purposes mind you, but I just moved into a new apartment where my door is ALWAYS locked. You can imagine I've accidentally locked myself out a couple of times such as when a angry gust of wind slammed my door shut. I will call the landlord no more!
- Bud 15y ago
  Just duct-tape an extra key somewhere weird. (Make sure it's weird enough. A block down the street underneath someone's front steps, under a mailbox that is not yours, something like that.)
  - Deestan 15y ago
    That's horrible advice. Firstly: Leaving your key in someone else's property is a good way to lose it. Secondly: Burglars are very aware of people leaving extra keys around, and what you may think is a super hiding place is actually #4 on the burglar's Typical Clever Hiding Place list. Duct-tape a set of lockpicks somewhere weird instead, if you're going with that. No biggie if you lose them, and a burglar is either not going to have the skill to use them, or carry his own, better set instead.
    - cagey 15y ago
      Doesn't seem like horrible advice to me. Sure, if someone finds it, you're out your backup key. But unless the thief SAW YOU put it there (and you hid it a block away from your abode as instructed) how is a thief gonna establish the necessary link between the key and the lock it opens? Try it on every lock in the neighborhood? And a backup key costs what, $3-$4, and can be operated by anyone, neither of which are properties of a lockpick set.
      - gjm11 15y ago
        > Try it on every lock in the neighborhood? Yup, quite possibly. The return/effort ratio for doing that is pretty good. The thief doesn't need to get in the same day as s/he finds the key, after all.
sandycheeks 15y ago
My wife still comes home from the flea market with old padlocks for me that she gets for a quarter because they don't have the keys. They make excellent cheap and sometimes challenging puzzles.
mcantelon 15y ago
MIT ordered the renaming of this? It's sad when learning institutions act like corporations.
- chaz 15y ago
  Why should anyone should be allowed to arbitrarily use an institution's name as though they sponsored a publication, event, organization, etc?
  - gruseom 15y ago
    Because the students of MIT, and its freethinking traditions, are as much a part of its name as its administrators are.
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    I don't think anyone was confusing the MIT Lockpicking Guide as an official publication. In fact, as I recall, it had a fairly sizable disclaimer that did pretty well to disperse such notions. I really don't see how this could be a problem, but the name of the United States Chamber of Commerce isn't.
- pavpanchekha 15y ago
  It seems reasonable that MIT wouldn't want it implied that MIT wrote the guide. You'd have the right to ask me to rename something I wrote from "mcantelon's guide to DDOSing websites". Clearly MIT has enough of a sense of humor to allow the current name to stay.
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    If 'mcantelon's' was a school that you attended, I would say you would be well within your reasonable rights to write such a thing.
    - joesb 15y ago
      If you owned a company "burgerbrain inc". Is it "well within reasonable right" for any of your employee to write "burgerbrain's guide to lock picking" without asking for your permission? Do you think it is within your right to write "[company you work for now]'s guide to X" without asking for permission from your employer? Just because a person is part of an organization doesn't mean he has the right to represent the organization in anyway he wants.
onosendai 15y ago
Something only tangentially related to this, but neat nonetheless, and this seems like a good place to plug it: how to open a kensington lock with a toilet paper tube, some duct tape and a pen. Actually tried this once and it worked. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as-CPdf-rKI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as-CPdf-rKI
GermTheGeek-2 15y ago
Unrelated, but take a look at what this publicity has done to his little server: http://www.capricorn.org/cgi-bin/status/capstat.cgi http://www.capricorn.org/cgi-bin/status/capstat.cgi
- Luyt 15y ago
  FreeBSD 4.11-STABLE systems. Incredible. They still exist, churning for years without complaint...
mun2mun 15y ago
Google already cached the pdf. Just paste http://www.capricorn.org/~akira/home/lockpick/mitlg-a4.pdf http://www.capricorn.org/~akira/home/lockpick/mitlg-a4.pdf in Google and open in quickview. Then you can save it in Google docs if you want.
cgag 15y ago
Can anyone recommend a good lock pick set and maybe some locks to buy to practice on? My mom expressed an interest in lock picking a while back and I was thinking of getting her some stuff.
- nirvana 15y ago
  I don't know if this is really the case, but I thought lock picks were something you couldn't easily buy. But my friend from MIT told me that the Cambridge street sweepers used metal brushes and the bristles were long flat pieces of spring steel, and showed me a lock pick set that he made from that with a bench grinder. He had a few spare pieces and that's what I made mine out. Both the tension wrench and the rakes can be made out of this kind of spring steel.
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    Lock picks are generally quite easy to acquire: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004EAME4W/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004EAME4W/ I don't know if they will refuse to ship to jurisdictions where laws are tighter.
    - evilduck 15y ago
      http://s.dealextreme.com/search/lock+picks http://s.dealextreme.com/search/lock+picks They definitely don't care about our laws. Worst case scenario is customs snatches them, but that seems unlikely.
- ChuckMcM 15y ago
  I attended a talk that Matt Blaze gave on picking locks and he discussed various 'tools' that folks use. The fact is that many locksmiths make their own out of bits of steel or steel wire that has been bent into shape. Of course there are kits with a mix of tools in them that are often available. But another thing he had done was to take a bunch of door locks and mount them into a board in a 3 x 3 arrangement (9 total locks) and removed pins so the first lock was 1 pin the next lock had 2 pins, etc up to 7 or 8 pins. Then you could practice picking them from easy (1 pin) to hard (8 pins). I found that to be a really clever thing and if you know someone who is re-keying their house or for some reason decides to replace all the locks, you can often get those from the locksmith doing the work.
nirvana 15y ago
I remember very fondly my experience with the MIT Roof and Tunnel Hacker's club. I didn't attend MIT, but was there visiting a friend over a weekend that happened to be "Alumni Weekend"... so the Roof & Tunnel hackers were taking old Roof and Tunnel Hacker Alumni along the new routes... and I managed to get to tag along. It was great to see the foyer under the great dome, looking down from the great dome, thru a spot in the fantastic lit stained glass ceiling where they'd removed one piece. I loved crossing a roof, very late at night, and I know the story behind "No Toad Sexing!" Though I didn't get to see any of the apparently few locations where Toad Sexing was authorized. I was quite struck by the ... ethical system that the Roof & Tunnel hackers followed. They were careful to keep us civilians in line, and at one point we came close to a lab where there was vibration sensitive experiments going on. To keep the Hackers out that lab had installed super sophisticated alarms, and the hackers told us about a couple ways they thought they could defeat them... they also discussed the fact that putting those alarm systems in created a greater challenge than most locations, and thus was an attractive target to try and hack, and how that was a bit ironic... but they didn't hack them simply because anyone who cared enough about to do that was someone whose experiments they didn't want to disturb. I remember running across roofs after midnight, going thru steam tunnels. And later, I learned to pick locks myself, and back in Louisiana, at my High School, which was a statewide magnet school on a certain College Campus, we picked our way into old abandoned buildings and even found a steam tunnel. (Yes, I've probably just outed myself to a select group of people.) Anyway, I wanted to take this time to publicly thank the Roof and Tunnel Hacker's club at MIT for a very nice night of criminal trespass. We left things the way we found them, and no property was destroyed, and a fun time was had by all.. and the patience thy showed to use "civilians" was greatly appreciated... even if, at the time, I was too awed and shy to properly thank them. In the year since, I've trespassed on many a building, crossed many a roof, and enjoyed quite a few experiences. I've always respected the property I was trespassing on, and have adopted the ethics I saw displayed that night. Plus, if nobody knows you were there, they're less likely to take steps that would make it harder for you to get back. PS-- Just remembered one "crime" from those years. I was out on a date, bragging about how I'd learned to pick locks and my date said something indicating dubiousness... we were passing a FEDEX dropbox at the time and I said, hey, wait a minute... flipped the lid and found the FEDEX secure lock and.... managed to open it almost instantly. This was about %50 luck and %50 figuring that the fedex guy was working a route and the combo would be an easy to remember one, which made it a lot quicker to guess, and I got it on the third try. Opening the box and showing her all those Fedex Packages sure made an impression! (then I closed the box and we continued on....) I think there's a lot of good lessons to be learned by young hackers in learning to pick locks, seeing the level of security that exists in practice, and the vulnerabilities. I hope the culture of this kind of hacking is still alive and well.
jamesbritt 15y ago
BTW, while this may be a overly paranoid, check your local laws before getting a set of picks, especially if you plan on taking them anywhere. When I got my set I lived in New York City and there you could plausibly be charged with possession of burglary tools for carrying them around. As a practical matter I never worried about it, but things being what they are you should at least be informed about possible risks.
- nirvana 15y ago
  There's a great scene in the Wachowski brother's early movie "Bound" where Gina Gershon is wearing a lock picking set as if it was a set of earrings.... Don't disagree with the legal risk you're describing, but female hackers might try the gershon approach.
- younata 15y ago
  In pretty much every state, it's not illegal to carry lockpicks, just illegal to pick locks you don't have permission from the lock's owner to pick. There are probably exceptions, but this holds true in at least California and Florida. Also, ianal, so I could be wrong.
  - jamesbritt 15y ago
    This is the law in Arizona: http://www.azleg.state.az.us/FormatDocument.asp?inDoc=/ars/13/01505.htm&Title=13&DocType=ARS http://www.azleg.state.az.us/FormatDocument.asp?inDoc=/ars/1... The key here is intent. As in, can a cop convince a judge you intended to commit or aid a burglary. When I got my set some years ago I was in New York, and you had to show that they were legitimate tools for your job in order to buy them. (They were, mostly.)
    - evilduck 15y ago
      It's a crapshoot though. Definitely look it up for each location. A lot of state laws include verbiage like "with the intent to commit a crime", while others word it such that possessing lock picks is the proof of intent, and where I am, there is no statewide law.
wyclif 15y ago
Anyone can learn how to pikc locks. There's an error in the second sentence of Chapter 1. Not promising.
- mvalle 15y ago
  teh guide has lots of typos.

275 points by jamesbritt 15y ago

For those interested in the back story... Back in the 40-60s(ish) people who are now commonly referred to as "hackers" were getting their start in the MIT Tech Model Rail Road club. They would get together and build model trains and tracks and hack together really neat ideas (neat if you're into trains at least). A lot of these same people were involved in the computer program, as well as general security. Lockpicking was sort of a game between a lot of the students as a way to hack their way into systems, just not in a digital sense. Many of them actually took mail in classes to become certified locksmiths just to get the special tools that were only legally allowed to be sold to locksmiths. In Stephen Levy's "Hackers", there is even a story of how the school bought a new military grade safe to keep components in the computer lab safe from prying eyes, but the installer forgot to leave a key. One of the students that the safe was supposed to keep out was asked to pick the lock, and did so with relative ease.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

jevinskie 15y ago

Locksport is a ton of fun! You can make your own starter set consisting of a hook pick and a tension wrench with nothing but a bench grinder and some hacksaw blades. With that pick, you can learn the basics of picking and (given patience) actually pick most any lock.

wtn 15y ago

The author could run this through spellcheck…

DiabloD3 15y ago

The MIT Guide to Lockpicking isn't about lock picking, its about how to think as a successful programmer. At least, thats how I've always viewed it.

barrkel 15y ago
If you want to extrapolate a more abstract lesson, I'd say it's less about thinking like a successful programmer and more about learning how to tackle problems while not following the "rules" of the problems. For example, a lock might have very sophisticated mushroom pins to avoid normal lock-picking techniques, and if you "play by the rules" with a normal tension wrench and simple pick, it may take you a long time - or it might never work. But on the other side, a sharp knock on the pins with a bump key refuses to play this game, and requires a different countermeasure for the lock. It's about looking at the whole boundary area of the problem, rather than the generally accepted one.

logjam 15y ago

My last encounter with Richard Feynman was not long before he died. Richard and Carl ate dinner with Julie and me at our house. We spent the rest of the evening practicing lock picking with locks from my rather extensive collection. I still sorely miss my friend, Richard Feynman. When thinking about interesting ideas, from either physics or computation, I often ask myself, "What would Feynman think of this?" -- Gerald Jay Sussman, MIT AI Lab, co-author of SICP

jwingy 15y ago

I'm going to study this and use it. Not for malicious purposes mind you, but I just moved into a new apartment where my door is ALWAYS locked. You can imagine I've accidentally locked myself out a couple of times such as when a angry gust of wind slammed my door shut. I will call the landlord no more!

Bud 15y ago
Just duct-tape an extra key somewhere weird. (Make sure it's weird enough. A block down the street underneath someone's front steps, under a mailbox that is not yours, something like that.)
- Deestan 15y ago
  That's horrible advice. Firstly: Leaving your key in someone else's property is a good way to lose it. Secondly: Burglars are very aware of people leaving extra keys around, and what you may think is a super hiding place is actually #4 on the burglar's Typical Clever Hiding Place list. Duct-tape a set of lockpicks somewhere weird instead, if you're going with that. No biggie if you lose them, and a burglar is either not going to have the skill to use them, or carry his own, better set instead.
  - cagey 15y ago
    Doesn't seem like horrible advice to me. Sure, if someone finds it, you're out your backup key. But unless the thief SAW YOU put it there (and you hid it a block away from your abode as instructed) how is a thief gonna establish the necessary link between the key and the lock it opens? Try it on every lock in the neighborhood? And a backup key costs what, $3-$4, and can be operated by anyone, neither of which are properties of a lockpick set.
    - gjm11 15y ago
      > Try it on every lock in the neighborhood? Yup, quite possibly. The return/effort ratio for doing that is pretty good. The thief doesn't need to get in the same day as s/he finds the key, after all.

sandycheeks 15y ago

My wife still comes home from the flea market with old padlocks for me that she gets for a quarter because they don't have the keys. They make excellent cheap and sometimes challenging puzzles.

mcantelon 15y ago

MIT ordered the renaming of this? It's sad when learning institutions act like corporations.

chaz 15y ago
Why should anyone should be allowed to arbitrarily use an institution's name as though they sponsored a publication, event, organization, etc?
- gruseom 15y ago
  Because the students of MIT, and its freethinking traditions, are as much a part of its name as its administrators are.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  I don't think anyone was confusing the MIT Lockpicking Guide as an official publication. In fact, as I recall, it had a fairly sizable disclaimer that did pretty well to disperse such notions. I really don't see how this could be a problem, but the name of the United States Chamber of Commerce isn't.
pavpanchekha 15y ago
It seems reasonable that MIT wouldn't want it implied that MIT wrote the guide. You'd have the right to ask me to rename something I wrote from "mcantelon's guide to DDOSing websites". Clearly MIT has enough of a sense of humor to allow the current name to stay.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  If 'mcantelon's' was a school that you attended, I would say you would be well within your reasonable rights to write such a thing.
  - joesb 15y ago
    If you owned a company "burgerbrain inc". Is it "well within reasonable right" for any of your employee to write "burgerbrain's guide to lock picking" without asking for your permission? Do you think it is within your right to write "[company you work for now]'s guide to X" without asking for permission from your employer? Just because a person is part of an organization doesn't mean he has the right to represent the organization in anyway he wants.

onosendai 15y ago

Something only tangentially related to this, but neat nonetheless, and this seems like a good place to plug it: how to open a kensington lock with a toilet paper tube, some duct tape and a pen. Actually tried this once and it worked. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as-CPdf-rKI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as-CPdf-rKI

GermTheGeek-2 15y ago

Unrelated, but take a look at what this publicity has done to his little server: http://www.capricorn.org/cgi-bin/status/capstat.cgi http://www.capricorn.org/cgi-bin/status/capstat.cgi

Luyt 15y ago
FreeBSD 4.11-STABLE systems. Incredible. They still exist, churning for years without complaint...

mun2mun 15y ago

Google already cached the pdf. Just paste http://www.capricorn.org/~akira/home/lockpick/mitlg-a4.pdf http://www.capricorn.org/~akira/home/lockpick/mitlg-a4.pdf in Google and open in quickview. Then you can save it in Google docs if you want.

cgag 15y ago

Can anyone recommend a good lock pick set and maybe some locks to buy to practice on? My mom expressed an interest in lock picking a while back and I was thinking of getting her some stuff.

nirvana 15y ago
I don't know if this is really the case, but I thought lock picks were something you couldn't easily buy. But my friend from MIT told me that the Cambridge street sweepers used metal brushes and the bristles were long flat pieces of spring steel, and showed me a lock pick set that he made from that with a bench grinder. He had a few spare pieces and that's what I made mine out. Both the tension wrench and the rakes can be made out of this kind of spring steel.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  Lock picks are generally quite easy to acquire: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004EAME4W/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004EAME4W/ I don't know if they will refuse to ship to jurisdictions where laws are tighter.
  - evilduck 15y ago
    http://s.dealextreme.com/search/lock+picks http://s.dealextreme.com/search/lock+picks They definitely don't care about our laws. Worst case scenario is customs snatches them, but that seems unlikely.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
I attended a talk that Matt Blaze gave on picking locks and he discussed various 'tools' that folks use. The fact is that many locksmiths make their own out of bits of steel or steel wire that has been bent into shape. Of course there are kits with a mix of tools in them that are often available. But another thing he had done was to take a bunch of door locks and mount them into a board in a 3 x 3 arrangement (9 total locks) and removed pins so the first lock was 1 pin the next lock had 2 pins, etc up to 7 or 8 pins. Then you could practice picking them from easy (1 pin) to hard (8 pins). I found that to be a really clever thing and if you know someone who is re-keying their house or for some reason decides to replace all the locks, you can often get those from the locksmith doing the work.

nirvana 15y ago

I remember very fondly my experience with the MIT Roof and Tunnel Hacker's club. I didn't attend MIT, but was there visiting a friend over a weekend that happened to be "Alumni Weekend"... so the Roof & Tunnel hackers were taking old Roof and Tunnel Hacker Alumni along the new routes... and I managed to get to tag along. It was great to see the foyer under the great dome, looking down from the great dome, thru a spot in the fantastic lit stained glass ceiling where they'd removed one piece. I loved crossing a roof, very late at night, and I know the story behind "No Toad Sexing!" Though I didn't get to see any of the apparently few locations where Toad Sexing was authorized. I was quite struck by the ... ethical system that the Roof & Tunnel hackers followed. They were careful to keep us civilians in line, and at one point we came close to a lab where there was vibration sensitive experiments going on. To keep the Hackers out that lab had installed super sophisticated alarms, and the hackers told us about a couple ways they thought they could defeat them... they also discussed the fact that putting those alarm systems in created a greater challenge than most locations, and thus was an attractive target to try and hack, and how that was a bit ironic... but they didn't hack them simply because anyone who cared enough about to do that was someone whose experiments they didn't want to disturb. I remember running across roofs after midnight, going thru steam tunnels. And later, I learned to pick locks myself, and back in Louisiana, at my High School, which was a statewide magnet school on a certain College Campus, we picked our way into old abandoned buildings and even found a steam tunnel. (Yes, I've probably just outed myself to a select group of people.) Anyway, I wanted to take this time to publicly thank the Roof and Tunnel Hacker's club at MIT for a very nice night of criminal trespass. We left things the way we found them, and no property was destroyed, and a fun time was had by all.. and the patience thy showed to use "civilians" was greatly appreciated... even if, at the time, I was too awed and shy to properly thank them. In the year since, I've trespassed on many a building, crossed many a roof, and enjoyed quite a few experiences. I've always respected the property I was trespassing on, and have adopted the ethics I saw displayed that night. Plus, if nobody knows you were there, they're less likely to take steps that would make it harder for you to get back. PS-- Just remembered one "crime" from those years. I was out on a date, bragging about how I'd learned to pick locks and my date said something indicating dubiousness... we were passing a FEDEX dropbox at the time and I said, hey, wait a minute... flipped the lid and found the FEDEX secure lock and.... managed to open it almost instantly. This was about %50 luck and %50 figuring that the fedex guy was working a route and the combo would be an easy to remember one, which made it a lot quicker to guess, and I got it on the third try. Opening the box and showing her all those Fedex Packages sure made an impression! (then I closed the box and we continued on....) I think there's a lot of good lessons to be learned by young hackers in learning to pick locks, seeing the level of security that exists in practice, and the vulnerabilities. I hope the culture of this kind of hacking is still alive and well.

jamesbritt 15y ago

BTW, while this may be a overly paranoid, check your local laws before getting a set of picks, especially if you plan on taking them anywhere. When I got my set I lived in New York City and there you could plausibly be charged with possession of burglary tools for carrying them around. As a practical matter I never worried about it, but things being what they are you should at least be informed about possible risks.

nirvana 15y ago
There's a great scene in the Wachowski brother's early movie "Bound" where Gina Gershon is wearing a lock picking set as if it was a set of earrings.... Don't disagree with the legal risk you're describing, but female hackers might try the gershon approach.
younata 15y ago
In pretty much every state, it's not illegal to carry lockpicks, just illegal to pick locks you don't have permission from the lock's owner to pick. There are probably exceptions, but this holds true in at least California and Florida. Also, ianal, so I could be wrong.
- jamesbritt 15y ago
  This is the law in Arizona: http://www.azleg.state.az.us/FormatDocument.asp?inDoc=/ars/13/01505.htm&Title=13&DocType=ARS http://www.azleg.state.az.us/FormatDocument.asp?inDoc=/ars/1... The key here is intent. As in, can a cop convince a judge you intended to commit or aid a burglary. When I got my set some years ago I was in New York, and you had to show that they were legitimate tools for your job in order to buy them. (They were, mostly.)
  - evilduck 15y ago
    It's a crapshoot though. Definitely look it up for each location. A lot of state laws include verbiage like "with the intent to commit a crime", while others word it such that possessing lock picks is the proof of intent, and where I am, there is no statewide law.

wyclif 15y ago

Anyone can learn how to pikc locks. There's an error in the second sentence of Chapter 1. Not promising.

mvalle 15y ago
teh guide has lots of typos.