Archive for August, 2019

Impromptu lockpicking village at Bornhack IV

Monday, August 19th, 2019

Jos and I (Jan-Willem) where at Bornhack.dk a small hacker conference in Denmark. Not only where the talks interesting also the quietness was welcome. Bornhack does not have multiple tracks so plenty of time to relax and pick locks.

We brought a lockpicking village in a box. A decently sized tool case with everything you’d need for a unplanned lockpicking village.

I’m attempting to learning manipulation of safe locks and brought a S&G lock and a bunch of manipulation sheets to Bornhack. It took me the better part of three days to crack it. (For a upcoming conference I’ve got an hour.)

Manipulating safes and safecracking sparked the interest of multiple people and I’ve did my best to explain the basics. What I was doing and how to exploit the lock.

Jos did his talk on post-its and invited people to join us at theFEEST village. aka Dutch village with free beer and stroopwafels. Many Danish hackers joined us at the village. It’s always fun to teach people a new skills.

Internet of lockpicks.

Note to self: Create a http://www.istodayfriday.com/ like website for lockpicking.

Key duplication revisited

Sunday, August 18th, 2019

A few weeks ago, we tested the Quick Key Easy Pro kit from Multipick, which turned out to work very well for duplicating a BKS Janus key and even a DOM Diamant key.

This time, we wanted to see if you really need such as expensive kit. First, we focus on the metal. Can we use cheap rose metal we obtained from the internet? We use the moulds we created earlier. The answer: yes, this works fine, for both keys. Our first attempt failed as the two halfs of the mould were not properly aligned, but that is “operator error”.

Next, we try to see if there are alternatives to the moulding material. We use cuttlebone, that is also used by silver smiths. We use a standard key to start with. The duplicate looks promising, but does not work. Again, we blame the alignment of the two parts of the mould. Some further testing is necessary. The cuttlebone is too brittle to be used in combination with the holder from the Multipick kit.

Attacking masterkeyed systems

Tuesday, August 6th, 2019

A couple of years ago one of our members, Jos Weyers, came up with a novel method to attack masterkeysystems. If you know Jos, it’s probably not at all surprising that this method mainly consists of impressioning. Attacking masterkeyed systems that way has several distinct advantages; no need to take a lock apart, no need for huge numbers of blanks, no need to have access to a working key, no guessing if your new key is indeed the master you are looking for, to name just a few. After keeping this knowledge within a rather small community for some time, it is now out in the open due to a talk Jos did at OzSecCon in Melbourne this year.Which off course includes live demo’s right there on stage.

https://twitter.com/kylieengineer/status/1139694231964938240

(masterkeysystem supplied and pinned up by Holly Poer , “southpark-esque lock animations” by JanWillem Markus)