We feared for it some time, but just received a mail that confirmed it. Officially the reason is ‘the crisis’ and that there is not enough budget …
Will report soon about the implications if I have more information …
* update: We are making an inventory of people who already booked an airplane ticket to Turkey. Please send me a mail and let me know (and how much you paid for the ticket).
In 2002 I already demonstrated the theory behind the ‘foil impressioning‘ method at the H2K2 conference in New York. The foil impressioning method is nice because it will open quite a number of high security locks and requires relatively little skill to do so. The only thing you need to have is a key cut to the deepest position (preferably a little deeper) and some adhesive aluminum tape that is used in the automotive and heating industry. You apply the adhesive tape over the holes of the key, trim the edges a bit and insert it into the lock. All you need to do now is put some turning pressure on the key and make small ‘up and down’ movements. The pins that are not in the correct position will bind and become stuck in the lock. These pins will push the tape in a little when the key is pushed upwards, and in the next round of ‘turning and rocking the key up and down’ these binding pins will keep pushing in the tape deeper and deeper until shear line is reached. The interesting thing is that once a pin reaches the ’shear line’ (opening position), it is no longer stuck and will not push in the tape deeper. The key will fit itself …
It is a great technique that is around for quite some time. In my collection of picktools I have some impressioning kits made for the locksmith market in 1995 and 1996. These kits use either foil or candle wax to keep the pins in place. If you take a close look on this key for example, you can see they milled a small fraction of the thickness of the key to make room for the foil. The key including the foil will push all pins to the highest position (or so we hope).
This brings us to the two disadvantages with this method. First of all, if there is a high cut and a deep cut next to each other, the foil is not flexible enough to cope with the difference. In this case you must pierce the tape if the lock does not open in a couple of minutes to allow the deep pin to sink deeper into the foil. And if the pin in the lock is short (a low cut in the key), there is a chance the pin will start to bind because it is not exactly on ’shear line’. And once this short pin starts pushing the foil in, you lost (as it will sink in deeper and deeper and you will never open the lock). One other disadvantage is that if the profile of the key is not fully flat (meaning if has a serious profile) the tape can not be applied correctly. If you try to put tape over (for instance) this profile, the edges of the profile of the lock will tear the tape when entering the lock. But that latest problem has been solved now by a Chinese tool manufacturer!
Just brand new on the market is a kit that uses a clever technique to also open dimple locks that have a serious profile (and are not one solid square piece of metal). The kit was brought to my attention when visiting Israel with Jord Knaap and Han Fey last week. A local locksmith called Raf (well known from the UK bumpkey forum) invited us to his shop and proudly showed me this tool and technique. The way the tool works is that you first take some aluminum foil and make a ‘U shaped’ form (using the special tool to do so) and make small incisions on pre-determined positions. Next thing you do is put the foil over a special blank that already has the profile of your target lock. The clever thing about this tool is that the ‘U shaped foil tube’ is wrapped around some sort of needle, and the foil can not be pushed in when entering the lock! Once the key is inserted, the needle is taken out from the back of the tool, and the pins are now resting on the foil. Because of the cuts in the foil, each pin will stand on it’s own ‘island’ of foil, and when it is pushed in will not disturb the neighboring pin! I have played around with it a little, and the design is really very clever and works fast and reliable!
There is something to complain though. The tool itself is made from ehrm …. not the best quality steel and will break after several tries. Nevertheless it is a great tool for it’s value, and I am sure this new method of ‘foil tubing’ can be applied to many more locks too ….
Thank you Raf (and friends) for the good time, and of course for your excellent video demonstration of this great new tool!
It was just in the news here: Dutch Police forces are on the lookout for new handcuffs. According to Gerrit van de Kamp of Dutch Police association ACP the current cuffs are ‘worn out’ after twenty five years of service. No link was made anywhere to a small little incident that happened last year …
And not just any handcuff will do to become the new standard … there is a huge list of requirements. For instance: they must be ‘comfortable’ (designed with ergonomics in mind). And the material used should of course be strong and durable, must be resistant against corrosion and not cause allergic contact rashes. And because “the Netherlands finest” already carry quite some tools on their belt the cuffs should not weigh more then 340 gram. The color is also specified: black. This is because shiny silver cuffs might trigger aggressive reactions. and talking about color: the tender includes one thousand ‘training cuffs’ in a light blue color.
But the funniest of all requirements is the one that specifies that they can only be opened with the correct key! Not a word if this key should me made out of metal or if a printed plastic copy will do. And most important: the cuffs should resist fifteen minutes of manipulation against someone who can use ‘tools’ like a paperclip, business card, screwdrivers or a split pin. Interestingly, normal household locks have a ten minute time limit against manipulation in the highest SKG 3 star certification. My free advise to the Dutch police: If you are even halfway clever you should invite Ray and ask his opinion about the cuffs before placing the final order….
And anyone wants to place a bet how long it takes before someone takes a picture of the key and makes a working copy out of it?
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And then on a personal level: I will start again with my ‘post on blackbag once a week’ policy. Meaning that around the weekends there will be a post here on blackbag. Next one will be about … LockCon, the ELF conference and the European lockpick championships …
These days a lot of people call me with questions about locks, most of them when they are in some sort of trouble….
Yesterday was no exception. An old friend (who lives far away) called me because his neighbor had a problem with his lock. Not strange if you keep in mind it’s really cold here now and there is a thick layer of snow covering the Netherlands. This neighbor had his house well protected and was using a LIPS OCTRO to lock his house (15 pin dimple lock). And now because of the cold the lock would not open anymore. They did notice the key went in and out the lock smoothly. So they tried heating the key with a lighter and keep the heated key in the lock for some time, yet that did not work. And now they called me for advice.
I did gave them advice but to be honnest that did not open the lock. And a couple of hours later I received a text message with the full story. And I will tell you the details in one or two days.
My question to you is: what would you have advised him to do (or what questions would you have asked)?
* Update: Tom gave the correct answer in the comments …
Some security company is big in the news here today. They hired a marketing company to do a security audit to prove hospitals need better security … even against terrorist threats.
Business news radio asked if I would be interested in talking with the director of the company on the radio. Of course I was interested and I think it turned out pretty well (8 minutes of streaming audio in Dutch).
The ELF conference in Turkey, First european lockpick championships, Lockcon … not to mention work and family life … it is a bit much at the moment…
So I took a rather dramatic step: I decided to officially take some time off from work. Meaning that from January 1st 2010, I will be no longer working full time for CryptoPhone and create some more time for the ELF conference and locks in general (although working at CryptoPhone remains my first priority). There already is a pile of requests for workshops, presentations and other lock related fun. Seems like 2010 is going to be an interesting year ….
I receive a lot of questions about LockCon and the ELF conference. People want to book flights early (while it is still cheap). If you do want to book please let me know (drop me a mail) and make sure to arrive in Istanbul on May 26 (or earlier) as LockCon will officially start on May 27 at 09:00 AM. And maybe (if we can get a lot of high quality content) we might change the opening of LockCon to May 26 20:00 PM. So please make sure you are in Istanbul by then….
On Friday May 28 the first official European lockpick championships will take place at the ELF conference ground. On Friday we will do the first rounds in the lockpicking, impressioning and safe dialing competitions, and on Saturday there will be the finals for these three disciplines. In the evening on Saturday the 29th the champions will be honored at the gala dinner. On Sunday evening most of us will travel back…
The biggest challenge we are currently facing is to find cheap places to sleep for the lockcon attendees. Istanbul is a nice place and in 2010 it is even the official european capital of culture. Meaning that all hotels are booked (or are not offering low prices) because it is ‘the place to be’. We are exploring options to get beds for a low price but can not make any promises yet…. work in progress …
To be continued shortly …
Faithful readers of blackbag know that if I am neglecting my blog only when I am really busy. Somehow this always seems to happen at the end of the year (last year I even closed the blog for a couple of weeks). But I will not do that this time.
Here is my delayed blogposting on the German ‘Handopening’ championships. It was won by … (you could have guessed it): Julian Hardt. Imagine: he won three out of five games he competed in to win a ticket to the ELF European lockpick championships and LockCon. I only hope for Julian he did not peak too early and will also win some prices in Turkey …
In the German games, it works a little different then in any other competition I know. The attendees need to bring their own lock to the competition and pick it in five minutes. If they succeed they are allowed to compete in the games and try to pick the locks from the other contestants. For these other locks they get fifteen minutes. If you did not pick a lock in this time you will get some extra seconds as a penalty added to the fifteen minutes. Julian brought an ASSA Twin 6000 to the games. Up to this date nobody has been able to open it besides Julian …
And since Julian won the handopening games, the ticket goes to the second place winner: Gerhard Hepperle. Gerhard is a very experienced picker who always ends up high in the list of champions. There will be an update on ‘Turkey’ real soon now. Hopefully within one week (two weeks max)….
Just returned from a week of Gitex in Dubai. Always interesting but also tiring and internet is not the same as we know it. And quite busy with a million different things … and not everything in my life is lockpick related you know …
This weekend lockpicking will play a role of importance again. If you can pick locks and want to earn the last available ‘free’ ticket to the 2010 European Lockpick Championships in Turkey … Cologne is the place to be this weekend. Our friends of the biggest and oldest locksport organisation “Sportsfreunde der Sperrtechnik - Deutschland e.V” organize their championships in the friendly environment of the NaturFreundehaus (youth hostel) in the ‘Kalk’ area of Cologne. Even if you don’t want to pick locks … just come and have a look. It is always a spectacular sight to see locks opened in seconds. During two days quite a lot of different games are played (as you can see on the schedule). The person winning the prestigious “Handöffnung” games (hand opening) will win a ticket to ELF/LockCon 2010!
Personally I put my money on this friendly gentleman ….
Looking forward to see you all in Cologne!
Never a dull moment (well … almost never …)
Wednesday a Toool delegation went to the 11th Pecha Kucha night in Amsterdam. For those who do not know pecha kucha: it a series of small presentations. Each presentation contains of twenty slides and each slide will be shown for exactly twenty seconds. And I can tell you: twenty seconds is fast when you are on stage. I also did a presentation and it went ok, although I must admit it was not my best performance ever.
After the presentation we put up a lockpick table and did a hands on session. From the three hundred attendees quite a large number learned to pick locks that evening. Worth mentioning is that the evening was organized in a former bank building. Guess who we found drooling over the huge safe (containing Lips four wheel combination locks)?
The last slide of my presentation was about an idea we have for quite some time now. We are looking for a ‘mechanical hacker space’ (or a Toool playground, hardware shop etc). A room to have our toool meetings but also a permanent workshop and possibly even training room.Currently we are exploring all sorts of relatively low costs rooms (like a 40m2 and 90m2 room at the Volkskrant building). After the presentation someone came to us and gave some more leads to cheap places were creative people come together. Lets see if this place ever becomes more then just an idea. If you have a nice space for rent we are interested to hear about it …
I was wondering how to call this post: Lockpicker-paranoia or paranoia lockpick-zophrenia. But in all seriousness, ever since we have been in the New York times (that was followed up on by various media) I have received lots of calls and e-mails from people who are ‘troubled by a lockpicker’. The story all these people tell is more or less the same and basically boils down to this: there is a lockpicker who picks the lock of their house, goes inside and does nothing but just move the furniture a little or leave subtle clues they have been inside. And all people who contact me have one burning question: What lock should I buy to keep this evil lockpicker out. *sigh*
I know that no matter what lock I will advise, they will always come back to ask more questions as the lockpicker will always be able to get in and ‘move stuff’. In one case I advised to install a 3KS+ lock and ensured them that I personally do not know people who can open them without damaging the lock. Yet, one day later I received a call from the same person questioning my advice. *more sighs*
Now the interesting part: I spoke with some people about this, and they too receive inquiries like this once in a while. What intrigued me most was one quote from someone who told me he personally knew of two cases where there actually was someone picking the lock (or duplicating a key) and moving stuff! In one case the ‘lockpicker’ even cleaned the house of his victim and used a vacuum cleaner to clean the carpet! Asked why these ‘lockpickers’ went to all this trouble to harass someone the motive was a little vague. Someone who does not like their neighbors or personal motives concerning intimate relationships.
I was baffled to hear about this an am very curious if other sources can confirm stories like this. Anyone got juicy stories to tell?
I wrote about public research before. As far as I am concerned research should be done out in the open. And all parties involved should know the vulnerabilities in detail. And parties involved for me are: the (potential) customers, the manufacturer and the rest of the research field (in other words: everybody). It is a fact that if you make a public announcement revealing eighty (or more) percent of your discovery, some clever person will stand up and fill in the missing part. And the more common a lock is, the sooner this will happen (as people have hardware to compare and try attacks on).
The greatest and most clever ‘lock hack’ I have even seen is a method to bypass some Medeco sidebar locks (on locks with bi-axial pins, filled by the official codebook, manufactured before Q4 2007). Marc Tobias and Tobias Bluzmanis hacked the lock and even wrote a book about it … an all time classic and ‘must read’ if you ask me (and I wrote the foreword). However, the book does not reveal the last twenty percent needed to actually make the so called ‘code setting keys’ that are needed to bump and/or pick open the locks.
I learned some time ago someone did his/her homework and published the findings on the net. A document called ‘code set.zip‘ appeared on a site called ‘mega upload’….
I wonder how long it takes before someone will post a cliq.zip there ….
My poor macbook died. I keep backups, so no harm is done, but it sucks to have to work on an old company windows machine for now.
So my posting is going to be a simple one today, using some images I uploaded to blackbag before the crash. One of the things I wanted to share is a couple of pictures taken at HAR from the by now famous ‘transparten lock’. These one, two, three, four images give you a much better idea how nice this lock is than in my original posting. And many people took the opportunity to play with the lock at HAR. If you have large demo locks like this please let me know!
One other thing mentioning was the round the clock presentations at HAR by my good friend Till. He demonstrated a system to copy mechanical keys called ‘quick key’ (made and designed in Berlin). It uses some sort of two component kind of rubber to make a mould of a key. Till showed that with a little effort almost any mechanical key can be duplicated. He even managed to copy a high security popular French safe lock key.
And to keep in line with my dead macbook … at HAR I have seen the most bizarre picktool case EVER…..
Hope to be back on a Mac sunday for a new update on BlackBag ….
The New York Times visited an Amsterdam Toool gathering last week and wrote a nice article about it (PDF) ….
German SSDeV member Ray is known all around the world for his impressive collection of handcuffs and his fun ways of opening most of them. On top of that he gives great presentations and always manages to add a lot of humor into them!
At HAR he pulled another stunt: He used a 3D printer to print handcuff keys. And not just any ordinary handcuff key … no, it’s the official handcuff key from the Dutch police! At first the police officers at HAR were a little reluctant to event try out the plastic key he printed. But he found another way to verify the key he printed was the correct one. I guess these officers never thought about wearing keys concealed, especially when talking with Mr. Handcuff himself. Given the megapixel camera’s on the market today it was not so difficult to verify the key he printed was the correct one.
At the end of the day he talked the officers into trying the key on their handcuffs and … it did work! At least the Dutch Police now knows there is a plastic key on the market that will open their handcuffs. A plastic key undetectable by metal detectors….
And Ray made it easy for you. For those of you wanting to print your own Dutch police handcuff key … the STL file is available online at http://ke.y.nu/
The New York Times just came out with an article on European lockpickers, quoting a Dutch Police officer who was not too negative about the lockpick scene. Lets hope they still feel this way after this post …
*Warning* Before you print out your keys please check your local law! Reading the article below (pdf mirror) should be a fair warning! In some places it is not quite healthy to run around wearing police handcuffs ….
Homeless man could get 5 years for wearing handcuff keys
Wed, Sep. 09, 2009
BY DAVID OVALLE
For wearing handcuff keys on a necklace draped around his neck, a homeless Miami Beach man could face years in prison.
Prosecutors on Tuesday formally charged Michael Gonzalez, 22, with disorderly intoxication, marijuana possession and two counts of possession of a concealed handcuff key — a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison.
“It’s an actual felony,” prosecutor Barbara Teresa Govea explained to Miami-Dade Circuit Judge John Thornton, who questioned the charge.
“There’s got to be some kind of constitutional violation in there somewhere,” Assistant Public Defender Michelle Prescott grumbled to the court.
Actually, the Florida Legislature passed the law after the 1998 murders of two Tampa deputies and a state trooper. Hank Earl Carr shot and killed them after he escaped his cuffs using a universal handcuff key hidden on a necklace.
Gonzalez was arrested Aug. 16 after Miami Beach police said he was harassing women on the South Beach sand. In a report, Officer Errol Vidal wrote that he found a small amount of marijuana in the man’s pocket and “two handcuff keys concealed under his shirt on a necklace.”
Also under Gonzalez’s shirt: a tattoo on his right shoulder, with the word “anarchy” and shooting flames.
A little delay updating blackback as I am quite busy with non-lock related stuff. But looking back at Hacking At Random’ still makes me smile … it was great! The people, the championships, the lockpick village, the presentations, the atmosphere … it all was magic.
And for us it was the ultimate dress rehearsal for the mega-event that is waiting for us at the 2010 ELF/LockCon conference in Turkey. The most important thing about that conference (for us) is that it will host the first official European lockpick championships. And we will be organizing it. Lockpickers from all over the globe could try to win three full paid ticket to that event at HAR.
From the beginning it was unclear if Julian Hardt could make it to Hacking At Random. But the moment he tapped on my shoulder and we greeted each other I said out loud: there go our tickets to Turkey.
And I was right. Julian won the most prestigious ticket to be won: that of the ‘unofficial european lockpick championships‘. And even though it was a hard battle, it was no surprise the winner would (most likely) be from Germany. And for me personally it was no surprise it would be Julian Hardt. I immediately admit that people like ‘Master of the universe’ Dr. Manfred Bölker or Arthur Meister also had a fair chance to win. But Julian is a multi-talent that keeps impressing us with his skills. He was the only one that managed to open the notorious Lips 6 pin in the finals (containing very nasty serrated pins). And on a side note: we just had another safe opening weekend where Julian proofed to be a bad-ass safecracker by picking open a couple of very high security safes (one of them containing a mauer variator B, 11 lever lock). The big surprise at the lockpick championships was to see Peter Fuhrmann from Labor/Bochum getting second! Arthur Meister and Gerhard Heperle became third and fourth.
Julian also became winner of the safe combination manipulation contest. In the qualifiers he opened his lock in 57 minutes … just three minutes before the end. In the finals he managed to dial open the lock in an impressive 21 minutes! But since Julian already won a ticket in the lockpick championships, second place winner Michael Huebler now won the ‘all in ticket’ to Turkey.
As the Germans have a tradition in winning lockpic games, the Dutch seem to have a reputation to protect when it comes to impressioning. Three out of the last four games were won by Toool members and the absolute world record time of 1 minute and 27 seconds is set by Jos Weyers from Toool too. It is interesting to note that both number two (Oliver Diederichsen) and three (Dr. Manfred Bölker) at HAR broke the previous record of 4:23 (by Olivier Diederichsen) by going well under the magical ‘four minute border’.
Still, we are not really clear about the future of these games in the current setup. For example: at the games in Sneek 2008 Oliver used 52 minutes to open a lock that would normally take him (much) less then ten minutes to open. And a few months ago in Hamburg Jos scored 46 minutes on a lock using six blanks … not to mention me not opening the lock at all.
This all makes it feel like some kind of lottery. So maybe we will sit down with some people before Turkey and work on a new style game to rule out this luck/bad luck factor (for example: people playing against each other on the same locks, using knock-out rounds).
There is so much more to say about HAR that I will split the post. The follow up will be about the presentations, the lockpick village and the more interesting things that happened there …
