Begin forwarded message:

From: johnhXXXX@hotmail.com
To: barry.wells@toool.nl

Subject: FW: Help!
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2010 13:00:24 +0300

Hello there.

We are forwarding this e-mail from XXX XXXXX. We requested a help to get out from the Rebelions leader close camp in the border to XXXXXX. The guys are comming and kill people everyday claiming to show where the goverment soldiers has gone. No one knows. but they have already killed 27 peoples up to this morning.

We can’t escape our death as the camp is made of steel shipping containers and the steel doors are all locked with Mul-T-Locks. We need the help on instruction to open this locks so we can run our death. Please Help us… We are dying….

John.

From: John HXXXX [mailto:johnhXXXX@hotmail.com]
Sent: 14 August 2010 11:13 AM
To: XXX XXXXXX
Subject: Help!

Dear XXX,

We are 124 XXX (country BW) citizen kidnaped by rebels near the border to XXX (country BW). They come and shot dead one person in front of us everyday! We was 132 up to now remained 124 only and they still come to kill us..

The building doors are all made of steel. But all the padlocks are MUL-T-LOCKS.

One of us has managed to hide her mobile phone connected to internet. We now use this phone to seek for you help to unlock these 3 locks and run away from our death.

Can you please tell us what to do with this locks to resque our life please…..

John.

That is right, after experimenting with knock-out systems in the games last year at the HAR conference, we will now expand this and let the knock-out system play an important role in the competitions at LockCon. We are real curious to see how this will work out in the lockpick competition.

So what’s the exact schedule? Please keep in mind that LockCon is a very dynamic and last minute changes can always be made. And we kept Friday evening open for last minute presentations and/or time to socialize. This is the schedule we have in mind :

Friday, October 8 2010

People are requested to arrive between 11:30 and 12:30 at the hostel. Toool representatives will be present at the hostel from 11:00 AM on to greet the guests and assign them a room. It is important to be on time as the first presentations begins at 13:30!

Friday 13:30 -15:30 Lock forensics: the more advanced stuff. By datagram

Datagram is a well known expert in the field of forensic locksmithing. His site http://www.lockpickingforensics.com/ is a one of a kind source on this topic. And we are very honored to have Datagram open lockcon with his presentation on advanced forensic locksmithing.

At this two hour presentation, Datagram will quickly go from the basics in forensic locksmithing to the more advanced stuff. He will go into detail on what traces are left in high-security locks when opening attempts are made with special decoder and picktools. And on Sunday Datagram will talk about the vulnerability in a lock many people thought to be ‘pick proof’.

16:00 – 17:00 “Wanna bet”?!? (Wetten Dass … 1986!). By Han Fey

Han makes friends all over the globe, and one of these friends is Mr. Frank Peter Wiersma. Back in 1986, when there were only a handful of television stations, Mr. Wiersma became a small celebrity in the locksmith community. He appeared on the popular show ‘wanna bet ?!?’, and accepted the challenge to try and file a working key to a lock in under three minutes (without trying the key in the lock!). His only tools: some files, one blank key, and just the ‘code number’ of a randomly chosen lock. In this presentation Han will give answers to questions like: did Mr. Wiersma succeed? What was his plan of attack? And just in case Han does not have the answers to all the questions … Mr. Wiersma is a guest of honor at lockcon and will be present too.

17:15 – 18:00 Medeco advanced and ARX pins. by Barry Wels

Medeco lately introduced special pins in the commercial product line to make their locks more resistant against picking and decoding attacks. And rumor has there are even more advanced pins in locks that are used in locations ‘that really matter’. These later pins are supposedly called “ARX” (stands for: Attack Resistance Xtended). What do we know about them? Do we know what these pins look like? How many different types are there? And do they really offer extra resistance against sophisticated attacks? This presentation does not have all the answers, but hopefully will give you some new insights. And a note to the public: If you have any information on ARX pins (pinning kit, individual pins, images, suggestions) please mail arx@blackbag.nl.

18:00-19:00 dinner

19:00 and later: time to socialize, give a ‘last minute’ presentation or compete in the combination lock manipulation competition.

Saturday, October 9 2010

08:00 – 09:30 Breakfast.

Saturday 10:00 – 15:00 The return of the lock Pathologist. By Peter Field
(Lunch 12:00-13:00)

As many LockCon attendees know, Peter Field has an extraordinary way of looking at locks. Like a pathologist, he cuts locks in many thin slices and captures the result with high quality photography. This unique methods of creating a cutaway view is world renowned. His lectures have been attended by locksmiths, security personnel, lock company engineers and Patent Office Examiners from many countries. And this will be the third time Mr. Field will give a presentation at LockCon. Peter Field’s presentations on locks is one of these things in life one can never get enough of.

He will yet again give a four hour(!) presentation about many of the different elements of high security cylinder lock design. Combining his unique cut-away imagery with illustrations from old patents, he will explain how engineers classify the cylinder elements, modify them, develop new ones, and re-combine them all to invent new products for the constantly evolving security market. You will leave this presentation with an outline and a clear understanding of the design constraints and functions of most of the various elements you may find in any lock cylinder.

About Peter Field: he started locksmithing in 1960, and in 1978 was asked to join Medeco Security Locks, where he is now Director of Research. He has over 15 US Patents pertaining to high security locks, with several more patents pending. Being a employee of Medeco one thing is clear: Mr. Field will not discuss any opening techniques. As he told us in previous years: “I am here to talk about locks. How to open them is up to you ….”.

15:30 – 16:30 Just a handful of keys. By Julian Hardt

Julian Hardt found a vulnerability in a number of certified (and non-certified) safe locks. Due to this vulnerability, the amount of possible keys one normally should have to try (the so called ‘key space’) can be greatly reduced. In some cases the key-space goes down from 280.000 keys to a number small enough that it might be possible to just cut the few remaining keys (or build a set-up key) and open the safe with just a handful of keys. In our community it is common to report these kind of vulnerabilities to the manufacturer(s). And that is exactly what Julian did. Thing is: they just have not responded yet …. maybe this announcement helps.

16:30 – 17:30 The Cromer Novum alarm lock decoder. By Till

This year, Till will present an old but very nice opening-tool. It is a tool to open Cromer Novum alarmlocks. And even though these kind of locks are not very common anymore, it is definitely worth showing the tool. The nice thing about this tool is that it makes use of pin and cam technology to decode the lock. Once the levers in the lock are identified, a set up key can be build to actually open the lock. Old but fascinating technology to open what was once a high security lever lock (and probably still is high security if you do not have the proper tool to bypass it). If you ask nicely, Till might let you try the decoder yourself.

18:00-19:00 dinner

20:00 – 23:00 Impressioning championships.

Impressioning is the fine art of opening a lock by filing a key from a blank. It is an ancient technique that still works on an amazing number of (high security) locks. Besides an old-school locksmith skill it is a technique still in use today by intelligence agencies worldwide for their blackbag operational needs. The championships speak for themselves: who will be the fastest filing a working key to a lock his year? The impressioning championships will be played by new rules too (very close to German rules). More about that soon, but we can already say that only “standard Abus five pin locks” will be used.

Sunday October 10

08:00 – 09:30 Breakfast.

10:00 – 11:00 Beating the BiLock. By Datagram

In this presentation Datagram will tackle a lock many people in our community thought was ‘pick proof’. BiLock products are well known for their double sidebar locks and two rows of ‘hard to pick’ pins. In the industry they are considered one of the most high security locks. In this presentation you will hear all the details on how the lock works, how the attack was discovered, what tools were made and how the company responded when they were informed ‘there might be a small problem’.

11:15 – 12:00 Mult-Lock MT5+ layer attack. By Jord Knaap and/or Han Fey

The latest Mul-T-Lock product range is the MT5-line. The MT5 is a high security cylinder that makes use of two security layers: an interactive element (the so called Alpha spring) and pin-in-pin technology. The top of the line product currently is however the MT5+. At the “+” series, an extra layer is added to the lock: a clever mechanism that uses sliders and a sidebar. In this attack we will focus on this new slider mechanism. Jord Knaap found a gap that in some cases can be used to bypass the slider mechanism and did the right thing: he informed Mul-T-Lock about it. And now, after they have been given time to fix the problem, you will hear about it at LockCon.

12:00 – 13:00 Lunch

13:30 – 15:30 Dutch Open lockpick championships.

We are going to play one-on-one, and ‘winner takes all’. In these games two people will be playing against each other, and the one with the most locks opened, or the fastest time if the same amount of locks are opened, will go trough to the next round. If the two contestants do not manage to open any of the locks they are both out of the game. In case we have an odd number of contestants, there will be three people competing against each other and the fastest two go trough. The last man standing wins!

There always is question about the selection of locks that will be used in the game. The brands will be kept secret, but we will try to arrange just two types of locks and make sure one of these locks is ‘relatively simple’ to open by an experienced picker. The locks used will be ‘standard’ five or six pin locks (so no dimple locks or special high security locks in the finals).

16:00 honoring the LockCon champs

17:00 Early dinner for those who need to travel

More information on how to register for LockCon2010 can be found here.

First there was the safe opening weekend. I am sorry to be repetitive, but the weekend was a great success. Julian picked open four safes, amongst them yet another couple of real monsters , and lots and lots of other safes were opened in more destructive ways. I really was eager to try to open a safe by manipulating a combination lock, but failed as the only lock around was a four wheel lips lock. I am by now reasonably experienced in opening three wheel ‘group two’ locks, but this four wheel lips lock was just a little too much for me. We ended up drilling a hole in the safe and using a scope to read the combination.

I like a challenge and am using the vacation I am in now to study the four wheel lock(s). Jord Knaap was kind enough to let me use one of his cut-away demo locks for this research/test. The lock is neatly mounted on a stand, and as Jord had an eye for details, he even included the anti-drill ‘hard plate’ on the stand (it’s the yellow layer between the dial and the house of the lock). The interesting part is that these locks have false cuts in their wheels, and the position of the false cuts seems to be different on some wheels. Maybe there is a pattern, but it is too early to say … It’s just the first day of my holiday today ;)

Behind the scenes we are busy preparing lockcon (October 8-9-10). It’s gonna be good as more and more people from all over the globe are attracted to it, and the presentations will be high quality as always. And I will use this two week vacation to reply to some mails people have send me. I am running a little behind but will be back on track before the holiday is over …

It is pretty exiting … the “Hack in the Box” conference is coming to Europe. And the good news is that it will be organized in my home town: Amsterdam. Over the years our friends of Toool.US always manned the lockpick village in the overseas “hack in the box’ events, but since the next one is organized in the Netherlands, the Toool.nl crew was asked to run it. Of course we accepted and are very motivated to make it a great event and a special lockpick village!. And besides the village we will also organize a two hour hands on presentation. So far Han, Jos and I volunteered to run the village but I expect more Toool members to join in.

And because of our support, members of Toool and readers of blackbag can get a nice discount on the entrance fee! Drop me a mail if you want to attend and I will make sure you will get a nice discount!

Another big thing of course is the next Hope conference in New York. Han and I will do a presentation and we will assist the other usual suspects to run the lockpick village there …

Our German friends from SSDeV decided to change the rules of the impressioning games. Instead of the fastest time on one lock, now more locks need to be opened and the person opening the most locks in the least amount of time wins. In the comments of this Hackaday post Jos explains the exact rules:

“First round everybody gets a keyed alike lock (so same amount of work) this round takes an hour. The six fastest go to the finals: during six rounds (20 min. each) all the contenders open one lock, which then gets swapped. So all finalists open the same 6 locks. The used keys are put in closed boxes so there is no way you know the key is supposed to look like.”

And with opening times of less then a minute these games are more and more looking like formula 1 pit stops. And so people are trying to come up with ideas and tools to shave off a few seconds left or right. The expert on the field of impressioning is Oliver Diederichsen. It was his research and book that really got us all started at this. And he came up with a new tool. It is a modified euro-profile cylinder that contains five sharp solid pins that will scratch the blank at the position the pins will make contact with it. Once these marks are on the blank, it is just a matter of filing them down to code 1-1-1-1-1 and start impressioning.

As Oliver is one of the most fair people I know, he shared the design and allowed others to copy it for future games. So Jord Knaap made a nice handle that contains a half euro profile with the steel pins. And the euro-profile core in Jord’s tool is interchangeable. At the back of the tool there is a small hole that will allow you to push out the cylinder and change it for another brand.

To come back to the games: they were won by good old Atrhur Meister, followed by Oliver Diederichsen and Jos Weyers. Congratulations guys. Looking forward to the impressioning games at Lockcon in a couple of months …

And I am currently more focused on other things then safe opening but I definitely want to try some new toys I bought at my latest trip in the US.

Hope to see the usual suspects in less then two weeks!

Just got back from a small tour trough the US. Visited three lock factories, a couple of interesting companies and met lots and lots of interesting people. And all these people had things to tell and … locks to show. As you might know I am a big fan of ‘the rare russian lock’, and was in the blessed circumstance to have held three different models of these masterpieces in my hand in just one day at different locations. And I managed to shoot some images of two of them.

I will start first with a version that was unknown to me. It is a ‘combination only’, and to be honest I was in such a hurry I don’t even know how many digits the code of the lock is. What is clear is that is was used for the same purpose of the other lock I covered in this blog some time ago. The idea is that the lock goes over a keyhole and a safe or door can only be opened if the correct code is dialed first. I also like the details of the hand engraved serial numbers on the back and in the inner ring of the lock, as well as side pins that lock and unlock the lock (and the red seal paint on the screws).

The other lock was already covered here once, but here is an image of the one I saw last week. So nothing new except another key as before and serial number that is just six numbers off the one we knew before….

As I am writing this blogposting, the impressioning championships in Hamburg are in progress …. curious to hear who wins! Getting life sms’es and will edit the post once the score is known …

If you are interested in attending, or want to give a presentation or lecture please let us know. The call for papers is officially open until June 10 and we still have room for interesting talks. Before the end of June we will come out with the complete program.

Here is the first information about LockCon 2010 in FAQ style ….

Q: What is LockCon?
A: LockCon is an international conference about … locks. Although we are modest people (ahum), LockCon is hosting some pretty innovative and unique presentations. (And we would like to hear from you if you have an interesting lecture you want to give). Besides these high quality presentations, there will be championships in lockpicking, impressioning and possibly (if time allows) safe combo-lock manipulation. One important issue about LockCon is that it is a place where creative energy flows and you can make friends for life (and an occasional enemy). It is the place where top lockpickers meet one another, and contacts are made between lockpickers and the lock industry. In other words: it is a unique event. To give you an idea read here about previous events.

Q: When will LockCon be held this year?
A: The weekend of October 8-9-10. This will allow international visitors to also visit the famous Security show in Essen Germany October 5-8 and come to LockCon when the show in Essen is over.

Q: Where will LockCon be held?
A: The location for this event is the StayOkay youth hostel in Sneek (Friesland) in the Netherlands (youtube video). This has been the home for many years now for LockCon and is a perfect location for an event like this.

Q: Who will attend LockCon?
A: A lot of interesting people. There will be lockpickers, safe technicians, locksmiths, 24-hour opening services, lock manufacturers, lock tool manufacturers, hackers, members of the law enforcement community, spies and an occasional beautiful girl. And a pretty big number of them will be overseas visitors.

Q: How Much is the entrance fee for LockCon?
A: The ‘full event’ price is €125 for three days. This price includes three dinners, two breakfasts, two lunches and two overnights in the hostel. It also includes drinks, beer, wine etc and a basic supply of snacks. Visitors who only visit one day will pay €65.

Q: Wow, where do I sign in?
A: Not so fast. LockCon is an ‘invitation only’ party for the locksport community. It is open for members of Toool.NL, Toool.US and SSDeV, but we reserve the right to deny people even if they are member of these organisations. If you are a member of another well respected locksport organisation there is a good chance you are welcome as well. If you are non of the above, you will need to find someone to introduce you and hope there is place left. We have set the maximum number of attendees to one hundred. For this event we have reserved ten to fifteen seats for people we never met before. If you think you have something to contribute, or just are a very enthusiast lockpicker that does not have the right connections yet, please mail us anyway. We are open to interesting people and might be able to work something out. Just give it a try, you might get lucky :) Mail registration@lockcon.com to register or for more information.

Q: So what’s the exact schedule?
A:Please keep in mind that LockCon is a very dynamic event and not everybody has submitted their presentation(s) yet. What we know now is that Peter Field will give a presentation (most likely on Saturday) and there will be championships in Lockpicking, Impressioning and (if time permits) combination safe manipulation.

Below is roughly what we have in mind, but things can still change. It all depends on the number of presentations we get offered from the community.

Friday October 8

People are requested not to arrive before 13:00 and a toool.nl representative will be present at the hostel from 16:00 on to greet the guests and assign them a room. 19:00 Dinner will be served a little late because some of the attendees will be arriving from the security show in Essen. People arriving after 20:00 will not be served dinner! At 21:00 we will officially kick off with the first presentation(s).

Saturday October 9 2010

08:00-09:20 Breakfast 09:30-12:30 A presentation by Peter Field.

People who were fortunate enough to see Mr. Field’s presentation last years know his unique way of presenting things: he combines patent drawings with very detailed images. We are honored to have him as a speaker again, and are real curious what kind of exotic locking techniques he will display this time. Since Mr. Field is a member of the lock industry (Medeco), he will not discuss any opening techniques. As he told us previous years: “I am here to talk about locks. How to open them is up to you ….”. Lets see if he can break his previous record of a five hour presentation! 12:30-13:30 Lunch

13:30-15:00 Peter Field presentation part II, hopefully with some room for questions.

15:15-18:00 Impressioning championships. Most likely according to new rules. Impressioning is the fine art of opening a lock by filing a key from a blank. It is an ancient technique that still works on an amazing number of (high security) locks. Besides an old-school locksmith skill it is a technique still in use today by intelligence agencies worldwide for their blackbag operational needs. The championships speak for themselves: who will be the fastest filing a working key this year?

18:00-19:00 Dinner 20:00 More presentations

Sunday October 10 2010

08:00-09:30 Breakfast 10:30-12:30 First round of Dutch Open lockpick championships 12:30-13:30 Lunch 13:30-15:00 Follow up Dutch Open lockpick championships and finals 15:15-16:00 Award ceremony The closing ceremony and distribution of the prices for the Dutch Open lockpick championships, the impressioning championships, the safe combination-lock manipulation contest and the Toool 2010 ongoing lock competition. More updates to this schedule and other information will follow soon. Please keep checking this space for further updates.

Q: I thought I heard LockCon will be held in Turkey this year?
A: That was the idea. We were invited by the president of the Turkish chapter of the ELF to organize our event in Turkey. They even promised us some sponsoring to get the locksport community to Turkey. Unfortunately the Turkish backed out of the deal after we fulfilled our obligations, blaming the crisis for not being able to organize the funds. We know from other sources this is not the full story and it just proves that the locksmith community is not ready for this … but all it will take is just a little more time. If there ever will be a next time we will make sure to ask a big downpayment :) Fortunately we have the word of one of the sponsors that he will personally take care of the promises/costs that were made.

We are highly motivated to make this the best LockCon everrrrrr ….

Still working on my LockCon posting but in the meantime an interesting link came in I could not just let pass by. An interesting video on what seems a ‘self impressioning’ attack on the Abloy Protec lock!

I will examine it more closely over the weekend but for now just wanted to share it with you … seems very interesting and very promising! Enjoy the video!

I did improvise a little and shot a video on how to bypass the chain using nothing more then a rubber band for you. Unfortunately I did not have enough time to experiment on how to lock the chain when being on the outside as I promised Charlotte I would spend my time with her and not geek around too much. But I guess a rubber band and some dental floss could do the trick.

And for those of you who want to test their ‘keyway knowledge’: can you tell by these keyways (1 2 3 4 5 and 6) what country we visited? BTW, keyway six is a lock used by the local phone or power company. And I did notice the hotel door keyway was the same as the picture I took of the lock in a completely different country.

Next post (after my short “I am now on twitter” message) is about Lockcon. It will be held the weekend of October 8-9-10. This will allow international visitors to visit the famous large security fair in Essen.

This could point to the fact a lot of electronic hotel door locks have a mechanical override. Most of the time there is a mechanical lock mounted under the handle of the door that can be opened with a master key. In some cases the lock is even hidden under a sticker or label, but in most hotels I visited there is a lock present in case the electronic lock fails (in some countries it is not legal to rely only on the electronics). I know that in some hotel locks a mechanical opening is still recorded by the electronics in the lock and will end up in the log files. To get hold of the masterkey, one could rent a room in the same hotel and simply (for an intelligence agency that is) take the mechanical lock out the door, take it apart and make the master key based on the now known pin lenght. (Or if you believe the myth, ‘they’ already have done all the fieldwork and collected the mechanical master keys to all important hotels in advance anyway …)

Another way to open some hotel doors would be to simply go under the door and grab the handle from the inside using a special tool. As you can see in this video, it is not so difficult. And the tool used to go under the door is even available in a ‘government only’ version. This version can easily been taken apart into small segments but is only sold to government agents.

And I suggest a slightly modified tool like the one on the video was used for the finishing touch of the murder. To make it look like a natural death, they locked the chain on the inside of the door …

It is all a funny coincidence as the video of the tool was just shot a couple of weeks ago when Han Fey and I did a presentation at the famous IT-Defense security congress Germany. It is a congress where we always meet lots of interesting people and always get a lot of invitations to give more presentations and/or workshops. We were originally invited to just do some hands on workshops and teach people the basic locksport/lockpicking skills, as well as a few simple opening techniques like shimming doors etc. But when some of the conference speakers missed their plane, we were asked to give an ‘emergency presentation’ to fill the gap. And as we do not like to give the same presentation twice, we shot some video (using a mobile phone) on the spot late at night about the door opening tool (and how to protect yourself against it) and inserted it into a compilation of existing presentations. Originally I did not intend to release the video as it shows me opening a door, but in this case I make an exception …

And for those of you who want to know more on the inner working of hotel locks, I have blogged about it before (including a video of ‘how it is made’)….

The automatic key impressioner reminded me on something I saw at a trade-show a couple of years ago. At the stand was a person with a some sort of ‘lock probe’ that could electronically read out the combination on some car locks. This lock probe was connected to a laptop, and after inserting the lock probe in and out of the lock a couple of times, the code of the lock was on the display of the laptop.

Curious on how this technique worked, I spend some time talking with the developer of the system. As we all know, most car locks are wafer locks. These wafers all have the same outer dimensions and the only thing that differentiates (for example) a ‘cut one’ from a ‘cut four’ is the position of the hole in the wafer. To make it a little more clear for people who are not into locks, I took wafers one, two, three and four from a car lock and stacked them on top of each other. You can clearly see a ‘stairway’ pattern if you stack them in incrementing order.

The lock probe I saw at the show used electric current to determine the position of the opening in the wafer. The idea is to put some low voltage on the body of the lock and ‘look for it’ with the contacts in the isolated tip of the lock probe. A high cut wafer will only make contact with the higher contact points in the tip, while a low cut wafer will give a reading on more contact points as the tip slides trough it. And there were a number of different probes for various lock models (variations in the spacing and position of the contact points on the tip of the key). The theory behind this may all look easy and straight forward, but it took them quite some effort to write a decent piece of software to convert the data into a key-code. The developer told me errors could be introduced if users insert the probe too quickly, and sometimes locks ‘in the field’ were so dirty/greased up that contact with the wafers was not reliable.

Of course I can only guess, but I imagine the “Electronic Key Impressioner” works on the same principle. I can’t wait to see the device in real life and be able to test it under some real world conditions. As I can imagine there is a range of wafer locks this technique does not work on. And I wonder if it can compete with some of the more sophisticated mechanical car lock decoders that are out on the market for many years now …

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).

* update 09/02: We are looking into some options. Latest May 1st we will come out with a statement/program about lockcon and the championships …

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!