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Lock-Picking Robot
- JKCalhoun 9mo agoThere is a link to AliExpress in the README that is broken. Another comment though suggests something like the "Sputnik Pickling Tool". Maybe like this wild machine: https://youtu.be/CLcOZhq2GjQ?si=LJktKRzeHPRyXcXR&t=155 https://youtu.be/CLcOZhq2GjQ?si=LJktKRzeHPRyXcXR&t=155
- showerst 9mo agoWhat a fun project! The use of wires to get around the corner is such a clever idea, although I see that goes back to the 90s. I'm surprised the idea isn't older. I wonder what makes it take a minimum of 0.7s per combo, it seems like it could be sped up substantially.
- MarkusQ 9mo agoCool idea but I'm not buying the justification. There are many cases where the correct response to "but law enforcement needs a way in" is "we have a system for that, it's called a warrant." 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.
- phantom784 9mo agoI don't see how this would bypass the need for a warrant. It'd allow for picking the lock rather than breaking it when you _do_ have a warrant (and whoever has the key isn't available or isn't cooperating).
- dec0dedab0de 9mo agoI have seen cops use lockpicking guns while serving warrants. I would much rather them do that then break the door down. Hopefully projects like this can make this better. Even though it’s cool enough on its own to exist just because 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.
- dylan604 9mo ago> I would much rather them do that then break the door down 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.
- dec0dedab0de 9mo agoEspecially with body cameras becoming ubiquitous, it should be easy enough to distinguish between necessary and excessive damage.
- ImPostingOnHN 9mo agoAnd once the distinction is made?
- dec0dedab0de 9mo agopay people who are victims of excessive damage, and punish the people responsible.
- ImPostingOnHN 9mo agoAh, that leaves us where we are now: able to recognize excessive force and excessive damage, but lacking the ability to punish the people responsible, who also decide not to pay victims anything.
- chuckadams 9mo ago> The fact that law enforcement isn't responsible ... is problematic FTFY
- showerst 9mo agoI don't think even the non-3d printed commercial ones are for law enforcement purposes. 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.
- jabroni_salad 9mo agoI can kinda buy the justification but I dont think the solution will get adoption. The TSA will cut the TSA-compliant locks if it will take the agent longer to find the key than it will to find the cutter. Or at least that's what the airline employee told me when I asked why my compliant lock had been removed. Law enforcement are not going to settle for a 5 minute skeleton key.
- observationist 9mo agoLocks are not security, in the sense that you're using. A sledgehammer goes right through 90% of them, or the hasps or latches secured by them. A competent lockpicking enthusiast will take two or three minutes to go through almost any of them. Someone motivated to get in with foreknowledge of the lock type can simply use a $200 camera and photograph your keyring from a couple blocks away, then 3d print all the keys on the ring and walk right in. 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 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm9K6rby98W8JigLoZOh6FQ
- Edman274 9mo agoThe thing about a sledgehammer is that if you're asleep in your house, you, your dog, your SO, or your neighbors might be startled awake by the sound of metal splitting and cracking open. Your security system might be designed to alert on something like a window being smashed. The person attempting to enter the house may be trying to enter undetected, because they know that a broken lock and/or a replaced lock will alert the people they're trying to ambush or steal from. Imagine something like industrial espionage, where a person breaks in undetected, steals an item, and then leaves. The occupant only realizes the item is gone a week later, and wonders if they could've misplaced it. In your scenario, they'd see the sledgehammered lock and immediately call the cops. 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.
- JKCalhoun 9mo agoGiven that the locks are so pickable anyway (any causal perusal of YouTube will reveal as much) I think lock picking is something of a community service to let people know that locks are, and probably have always been, to keep honest people honest.
- tialaramex 9mo agoThey also allow you to distinguish legitimate operations. Maybe that armed guard isn't sophisticated enough to realise that your ID is fake, but they do know that you're supposed to use a key to open these lock, you were not supposed to turn up and smash one open -- which means that maybe you're not who you say you are after all and best you stay right there while they call somebody. 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.
- cush 9mo agoThe creator doesn’t mention anything about helping law enforcement. They mention cheap off-the-shelf tools that could do a better and faster job than this robot. There are many reasons pick locks, including it being a hobby.
- raincole 9mo ago> security through counting on slow hardware 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.
- petsfed 9mo agoEh, its more that any one security tactic will almost certainly not cover the entire threat space. Locks are very good at discouraging honest people and lazy, opportunistic people. They are not very good at discouraging generally skilled and motivated people, or people who are specifically interested in what's behind a specific door. Locks are no obstacle if the intruder is willing to use social engineering. But if all they're trying to do is get into my garden shed, they're going to have to manipulate me or my spouse. Or somehow get past my dog. Meanwhile, my dog has absolutely no bearing on a bad actor getting access to my bank account. But similarly, bringing the full might of the best electronic security to bear to protect a chainsaw and a rake seems a bit excessive. And sort of beside the point, since I've not built my garden shed to withstand creation of an additional door (by e.g. a sawzall or a fireaxe).
- quickthrowman 9mo ago> But if all they're trying to do is get into my garden shed, they're going to have to manipulate me or my spouse. You can cut virtually any padlock with a battery powered angle grinder or battery powered hydraulic bolt/rebar cutters in under 30 seconds, there’s hundreds of YouTube videos that demonstrate it if you want to see for yourself. Lithium-ion battery powered tools changed the game. Locks do not provide real physical security, they just keep honest and lazy people out.
- petsfed 9mo ago> Locks do not provide real physical security, they just keep honest and lazy people out. Really?! I had no idea! I had such a miniscule understanding of what portion of the threat space locks address that the second sentence in the very fucking post you're replying is this: > Locks are very good at discouraging honest people and lazy, opportunistic people. I'm so ignorant of the threat space, that the sentence immediately following that one goes: > They are not very good at discouraging generally skilled and motivated people, or people who are specifically interested in what's behind a specific door. I guess you're right, the two sentences I wrote 76 characters before the one you're shitting all over as evidence of my ignorance have absolutely no bearing on the context of the statement I made. They just exist entirely disconnected from any other sentences in that same post. I bow to your superior intellect and analytical skills.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- 3eb7988a1663 9mo agoThere is also a Safe Cracking Robot [0] Blog about it: https://joeleb.com/safe-cracking-robot-defcon/ https://joeleb.com/safe-cracking-robot-defcon/ [1] Defcon video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9vIcfLrmiA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9vIcfLrmiA
- mmcwilliams 9mo agoThis is a class of device usually called an "auto dialer" and have been around for quite some time. This one appears to be fairly low-featured. Newer devices will automatically send a text when a safe has been opened and the better ones are programmed with knowledge of the internal plate schematics so they can shorten the brute force process.
- IshKebab 9mo ago> brute force all possible combinations Somewhat less impressive than I was expecting. The wire idea is neat though.
- dpark 9mo agoI felt the opposite. Sometimes figuring out a clever way to make the “dumb” thing possible is very impressive.
- kalavan 9mo agoHuman lockpickers use feedback when picking. I'm wondering if a bot could do the same - e.g. measuring the travel distance to find a binding pin, or the resistance to moving the wire?
- Izkata 9mo ago> Human lockpickers use feedback when picking. Or discover when locks are built really badly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeDcOhWvq7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeDcOhWvq7I
- Night_Thastus 9mo agoPossible, but to do it at the level of precision needed for lockpicking would be a very expensive piece of equipment.
- moffkalast 9mo agoThe next step is to train an ML model on all videos of the lockpicking lawyer and it'll get a click out of one, three is binding every time.
- hvs 9mo agoI'm a strong supporter of the "I did it because I wanted to see if I could do it" ethos. So this isn't a criticism of the project itself, but I'm pretty sure a snap gun will beat this almost every time.
- nycdatasci 9mo agoI don't think this is a relevant comparison. Snap guns break pins, which isn't the case with this robot.
- avidiax 9mo ago> Snap guns break pins They are a kinetic attack on the pins, but they don't shear or shatter them.
- saalweachter 9mo agoI would also kind of respect the project if it was a mechanization of McNally's "It can be opened with a Master Lock".
- kittywantsbacon 9mo agoI'm surprised this doesn't use the lishi tools
- bmitch3020 9mo agoIt's not picking, it's brute forcing every combination. Lishi and other lockpicks require tension and feedback, often one pin at a time, which is the opposite of what this tool is doing.
- Animats 9mo agoRight. The next step up is a robot that uses a Lishi tool and force feedback. Then one that just uses a single pin pick and a tensioning tool. This is a neat machine learning problem.
- cush 9mo agoThe number of comments in here slandering the developer’s morality for picking locks is actually pretty surprising for a site literally called Hacker News. Every day there’s a story on the front page of some grey/white-hat showing off an exploit they found to infiltrate a site we all use. It’s an odd double standard.
- raincole 9mo ago> the number of comments Two of them in total, if I counted right.
- dormento 9mo agoStill astounding in a place where "hackers" congregate.
- stackghost 9mo agoThis place lost its hacker lustre at least 10 years ago. I registered my first account in 2011 or so and even then it had plenty of "pro-big corporate" energy here.
- daveguy 9mo agoIt's a site that was founded and run by venture capitalists. It always had "pro-big corporate" energy. If for nothing else, because that's one of the potential exit strategies.
- stackghost 9mo agoI know but there was a "hacker spirit" undercurrent that's been diminished of late, I feel
- hk__2 9mo agoMeh, when I registered in 2012 people were writing the same thing.
- mrexroad 9mo agoI reread Neuromancer last month and there was a line about how the AI had to recruit a human for its plan b/c the final step had a mechanical lock that needed to be picked by feel. I’m glad to see this is a brute force approach and that us humans still have some use for a while more (not sure if my comment is /s or not).
- omoikane 9mo agoBe sure to also check out some of the MP4 files in the images directory: https://github.com/etinaude/Lock-Picking-Robot/tree/main/images https://github.com/etinaude/Lock-Picking-Robot/tree/main/ima... I was surprised that those thin copper wires can actually push the pins up, I thought they would slide off to the side or compress themselves against the more solid/rigid pins.
- gattilorenz 9mo agoIt’s the same principle of a safe-cracking robot, but for regular keys. Smart! But… does it do commentary like “one is binding”, and does it try twice to see if it was a fluke? :)
- gpderetta 9mo agoWell no, as it doesn't rely on force feedback. It could do the "what I have for you today ..."routine though!
- torginus 9mo agoI hope version 2 will also do double-entendres on April 1st :)
- cryptonector 9mo agoIt also has to have the Lock Picking Lawyer's voice. Or McNallyOfficial's.
- eleventen 9mo agoI sell these over on covert instruments dot com
- d--b 9mo agoCause the world needs more tech to erode common people’s privacy.
- codezero 9mo agoHouses have windows, and bricks are widely available, locks don't protect you, they exist as a social contract: "don't go in here," if people want to go in there, they will, but we have a mostly civil society (fair to argue against this), and locksmiths exist, so this is just a tool, and a fun project.
- dyauspitr 9mo agoAre there commercial versions of an automatic lock picker? Cursory googling seems to only have brute force electronic vibrators, nothing specific. Otherwise it seems like relying on force feedback and mechanically replicating lock picking techniques as a first step might be a great project that seems very technically feasible.
- dosman33 9mo agoRobotic sputnik tool, it is very slick. Something that's not obvious is that these work best on ABUS or other locks that have one solid driver pin and spools in every remaining pin stack. This way, when you locate and lift the solid driver pin, you gain a ton of "back and forth slack" in the plug. As you lift each successive spool driver the slack reduces until the shear line is hit on that pin stack and suddenly full slack again; repeat the process until the lock is open. The devil is in the details though, there are some subtle features that need to be incorporated into the mechanics for the sputnik to work right. I have built a sputnik from scratch before, only after talking to Oli Diederichsen at a LockCon did I get some additional clues. Also, I think there are plenty of other interesting things one could do besides brute forcing the lock with a simpler tool. Falle Safe has a single-wire variant on this for decoding locks. Again, the devil is in the details, just ramming wire up a pin stack doesn't get the job done.
- rvz 9mo agoThis is the one of the hacker news article(s) I come here to read. Something different, intellectually creative and original. Great work by the author.
- booleanbetrayal 9mo agoIf your lock is one of the most common 90% of consumer pin tumbler locks, you can just avoid all this complexity and bump key them instead. [0] Lock bumping (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_bumping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_bumping
- codezero 9mo agoI am pretty sure anyone building a lock picking robot is at least aware of some lock picking basics, and that's clearly not the point of a project like this. They could get a Lishi, a rake, a comb, almost anything, and we could also argue that this won't work with pin-in-pin dimple locks, tubular locks, and disc detainers, but again, obviously not the point.
- bigiain 9mo agoI'm now imagining a sub-genre community like the 3D printer Benchy racing people. A friendly competition to see who can build the fastest robot that can open a small range of the most commonly used locks.
- codezero 9mo agoThis is a fantastic idea for a community challenge! Would have to make some ground rules though or else the winning bot is just a diamond coated drill or a gallium squirt gun.
- mrbluecoat 9mo ago> it will be able to open difficult-to-lick locks Those darn electrocutor locks! Best laugh this week :D
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- justapassenger 9mo agoThis is the lock picking robot and what I have for you today is a github repo.
- kristianpaul 9mo agoGood reason to switch to digital locks that could stop this kind of attack but increases the unlocking in other ways
- codezero 9mo agoAlmost every digital lock I've seen (I own about 5) have a keyway hidden under a rubber tab or plastic tab. I haven't built an EMP device yet, but supposedly that works on a lot of them too.
- fencepost 9mo agoI feel like developing something that could actually pick locks including detecting binding pins, etc. is in the category of "not actually that hard if you devote the resources to it." On the mechanical side there would certainly be some challenges (having to work within a key that's all the deepest cuts, using something that could push up to "shallowest cut" level without deforming, general structural strength problems) but once you had a viable insertable key portion built you might be able to read a lock based just on the amount of spring resistance at each pin. You could also provide tension while probing for pins under tension. If covert agencies don't already have pretty portable devices like that it's because they don't care enough to create them not because of some true technical problem with doing so.
- huflungdung 9mo ago[dead]
- cloudfudge 9mo agoI think the biggest problem is that the amount of tension you need to apply to hold the binding pins can vary quite a bit, and it's hard to build a mechanical device that can feel with enough fidelity to figure it out.
- jiveturkey 9mo agonot at all. sensitive strain gauges are commonplace.
- cloudfudge 9mo agoI think if you actually tried to build this, you'd find that highly sensitive strain gauges are not sufficient. The human hand is extremely sensitive, and for example can detect tiny clicks and vibrations that you're not going to get with a simple strain gauge.
- fencepost 9mo agoNot really, once you have any materials issues with the vertical portion ironed out you just need a fine but rigid shaft within the body of the 'key' to bring it all the way out to where you have plenty of space to work. You'd need to have the shaft in a tight channel, but that's purely mechanical and should work just fine over even several inches.
- zippyman55 9mo agoSo robots will replace lawyers.
- codezero 9mo agoNice one, I assume a lot of folks here maybe get the reference?
- zippyman55 9mo agoThanks. Yeah, I was talking to a lock picker and his hourly rate is more than my attorney. He tells me, that is why he stopped being an attorney. Badda boom.
- stavros 9mo ago"This is the Lockpicking Robot, and what I have for you today is 34 hours of brute-forcing a master lock."
- lyu07282 9mo agoWith so much infuriating nonsense in this thread I feel fucking compelled: Access to computers - and anything which might teach you something about the way the world really works - should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative! All information should be free. Mistrust authority - promote decentralization. Hackers should be judged by their acting, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position. You can create art and beauty on a computer. Computers can change your life for the better. Don't litter other people's data. Make public data available, protect private data. https://www.ccc.de/en/hackerethics https://www.ccc.de/en/hackerethics
- Sparkyte 9mo agoThis is the Lock-Picking Robot and today we are unlocking a macbook password with a drinking-bird only pressing space bar. I've seen too many Lock-Picking Lawyer videos.
- etinaude 9mo agoWoah! That's me! Tones of fun to work on For my other projects check here: https://etinaude.dev/ https://etinaude.dev/
- jiveturkey 9mo ago> brute force rather inelegant, similar to an autodialer for safes. i was hoping to see something that worked like a human lockpicker!