After hard work it is time for food and drinks ….

The score of the safe opening weekend: 15 high security safes were opened. Most of them drilled, yet some of them decoded and picked. More information on the days to come … we are having a beer now …

With one week to go to our own safe opening weekend, a very nice article in Wired to get in the mood.

Fascinating stuff! Still reading and sifting trough all the details myself … A must read!

I had dinner with Marc Tobias last week, and one of the things we spoke about was ‘disclosure’.

It is my philosophy you should warn a lock company if you find a (new) flaw in their product and give them time to fix it and inform their customers. Marc however defended the standpoint to only give them time if they promise to exchange the locks in the field, or apply a patch, free of charge. It is a dilemma, especially if you see how companies like Uhlmann & Zacher suffered from anonymous youtube videos that popped up out of the blue.

The other side of the medal is that lock companies sometimes are sloppy and do not take this all too serious. I still have not fully made up my mind about the future of disclosing issues, but tend to lean in Marc’s direction. If companies promise to compensate/exchange the flawed products the consumer wins. If the manufacturer does not want to fix the problem, the consumer needs to know the lock needs replacement. And most likely replace it with a product from a company that does take it’s customers serious….

But I guess it is a decision we will make case by case, as not all locks and flaws are equal …

To be continued for sure … (and I am curious to hear your opinion about this …)

This week a story about less dangerous magnets 🙂

I was in Spain last week and when I visited a lockshop the owner gave me a small present. It is a lock I knew for a while (named Disec), yet it’s a lock I never managed to get my hands on.

The DiSec shield is a lock that is mounted over your euro profile cylinder, protecting it against vandalism and unathorized opening attempts (like bumping, breaking and drilling). It is the kind of extra protection I like in a lock.

I was in Spain because we had a booth with CryptoPhone at the 3GSM tradeshow. During the slow hours I always like to quickscan the show to see what is new in telecomland, and collect some gadgets and gifts for the kids. One of the gifts I collected was a small teddybear (or is it a cat?) that has a small magnet in it’s head.

It did not take me long to rub the magnetic part of the bear’s head against the lock, and opened the lock in just a couple of minutes. The technique I used can be considered ‘raking’, and requires some skill and luck. The skill in this case being able to control the amount of tension on the shield while jiggling, as well as varying in speed and rotation with the magnet. But without a little luck the lock remains closed …

I did shoot some video for you, showing how I opened the lock. After opening, I did disassemble the lock and key a little.

And there are people who do not use raking but actually pick the lock (youtube) in a more clever (but less fun?) way ….

On my way to CeBit now. Lets see what kind of gifts I collect there that can be used to open locks 😉

I remember when someone first showed me a ‘todesmagnet‘ (magnet of death) and warned me it was a real dangerous item. Dangerous because it could open (older generation) Winkhaus Bluechip locks, but even more dangerous because you could get really hurt if your finders ever came between the magnet and something metal.

Yesterday my good friend Rop mailed me a link to a story by someone who had a ‘small accident’ with magnets that were even more powerful as the todesmagnet. And that person had to pay dearly for his mistake. The image above shows you two magnets with the remaining of his fingertip in between. Click the image to read what happened to him when he was playing with heavy magnets. Only click it when you don’t have a weak stomach (or just had lunch).

Traditionally Rob Zomer and Paul Crouwel organize a “safe opening weekend” every year. And this year is no exception. On March 20,21 and 22, they will (assisted by a group of other experts) try to open some of the 33 locked bank safes that were collected over the year and are waiting to be opened on a terrain in Haarlem (NL).

The ‘safe opening weekend’ is a very internationally oriented event and this year people from the US, France, Spain, Germany and the UK have shown interest in attending.

Even though we have a relatively large group of people working the safes, it will most likely not be possible to open all 33 safes in one weekend. Some safes on the top of the list are a martens rosengrens and a couple of Lips bank safes (like a Lips Europlanet, LIPS VS and Lips TAR).

In the previous events the main focus was to drill the safes open. This year the focus will shift a bit to picking and decoding the locks, as well as trying a really unique tool that will hopefully open a high grade ‘unpickable’ safe lock…

We will also finally try to fully disassemble the ‘Russian lock‘. This extremely rare and special lock had been analyzed quite far, yet one part still remains a mystery. Hopefully we can fully take it apart this time and get it to reveal the last secret part. I will do my best to capture it on video …

The ‘safe opening weekend’ is meant for safe technicians all over the globe to learn from each other. If you are a safe tech (preferably SAVTA member) and want to attend this event, please mail Paul Crouwel (crouwel@xs4all.nl). If you are allowed in, the fee for the weekend is 60 euro (for food and drinks).

This is one of these topics that I wanted to write about before, but never managed because of my little break last year.

As you might know Abloy’s Protec cylinder has quite a reputation as being an outstanding lock. For the moment it is very difficult to pick/manipulate (although there are rumors someone developed an opening tool). One other feature is keycontrol: it is quite difficult to have copies made if you do not have the certificate. And in case you need it for a high security installation the housing of the lock can be delivered in an extra strong steel body that is difficult to break and drill. All in all it is a very nice and secure cylinder that many people in the locksport community use on their front door 😉

But … as always: if a product becomes ‘too popular’, some clever person will come up with a tool to defeat it. Unfortunately (for us lockpick tool lovers) the clever person came up with a destructive opening technique (instead of a non-destructive method).

But the method of opening the lock is extremely simple and effective (as you can see in this youtube video). In less then a minute the lock is open. Ok, it might not be completely silent, but it sure is fast! … And to make things worse: the tool even seems to work on the hardened version of the lock.

If clever tools show up on youtube, they most of the time can be ordered at Wendt ….

I have seen quite a number of Lips Keso keys, but the image Han mailed me yesterday did cause me to raise an eyebrow …

What you see here is a dimple key with a part of the tip milled out (flattened). Han tried to insert a normal blank key, but that would not go in all the way. The lock really ‘checks’ for the key to be flat on the tip.

At first this really puzzled Han, but when asking around he learned that this was done for large master key installations when they ran out of combinations. (imagine, fifteen pins and four possible depths per position … that must have been some master key system!).

This is a pretty old system, yet it is interesting to still learn new things about it ….

As long as I am into locks (and opening them) I have had a fascination with ‘restricted’ keyblanks.

One of the systems you still see a lot here is the ‘KB’ series sold by Nemef (and made by CES). There is a range of twenty different profiles in this system, and in my impressioning kit I carry five blanks of each profile. Three keys are the long ‘six pin’ version and two are the shorter ‘five pin’ version.

Until last weekend. “DeciBell-120”, one of the most loyal Dutch Toool members, showed me a trick. If you take keyblank number 14 of the CS20 series and cut away two grooves, the blank will fit all twenty profiles!

When I told my local locksmith he ordered a bunch of them, and over the weekend I put my keyway king to work. And now my impressioning kit is not as heavy as it used to be as I am carrying eight keys instead of one hundred …

If any of my readers are familiar with similar tricks/stories I would love to hear them 😉