As always we are organizing our yearly LockCon. On the Toool website you can always read the latest news about it (http://toool.nl/LockCon)

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 ….

Times are interesting. It is busy, but mostly with things I really enjoy doing. So fear not if you did not see a posting for a little while here 🙂

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’ve created the Twitter account ‘barrywels’ and installed a plugin that automatically twitters whenever I post here. So now you can follow me on twitter if you want to know when I post here. If I tweet anything else, it should show up in the sidebar to the right. I’m not planning to tweet about going to the toilet or having dinner, so following me should not generate a huge amount of messages.

Times are pretty hectic so Charlotte and I decided to take off to one of Europe’s nicest cities for a relaxing weekend without the kids. When we entered our hotel room I was thrilled to see it had a chain on the inside … (see my previous post on hotel doors to read why). The chain is a weak link by itself as it was obvious if had been broken and repaired many times before. In my opinion it is not necessary to use force on the chain as it can be bypassed relatively simple.

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.

I am reading up on the assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh with red cones. Never ever have so many operational details come out about missions like this. Twenty years ago this would have gone on file as a ‘highly suspicious death’, but in this day and age of CCTV camera’s it did not go unnoticed. What is special this time is that a (must see) video just was released by Dubai police, and it looks like a hollywood production. The link to this blog? … since the murder took place in a hotel, I was immediately interested to read details on how they gained entry. And there still are some things unclear about it, even though this article speaks about “They entered the room using copies of keys they had somehow acquired.”

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’)….

A lot of people asked my opinion about the “Electronic Key Impressioner” that has been in the news lately. The device is not for sale yet and the only thing people have seen so far is a computer model of a device. Technical details are not out yet (as far as I know). This being a news item triggered a lot of people who are now curious if a device like this could really work, and if so, what is the technique behind it.

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 …

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 various handcuffs that you currently have in consideration … it could save you some embarrassment later down the road …

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 …