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 ….
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.
