Hacker News Reader

Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

I just posted this amateur documentary about a guy that prides himself in saving safes from the drill. He only does manipulation. He uses a stethoscope and sometimes a laser pointer to visualize the wheel angles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hz_kjTc8DQ

View on HN

The first thing I though about when listening to his description of moving the dial was a servo motor with a torque measuring shaft hooked to a microcontroller. It sounds like you could just graph torque required to turn it over 360 degrees to get the same info he was getting.

This is called the "soft drill". And strangely, this can still be a destructive attack. There are systems that can do proper manipulation by graphing out the gates, and there are systems that just do brute force attacks by dialing every combination. I've been told that the brute force machines that try every combination typically wear the lock out and it needs to be replaced afterwords.

Yeah, I certainly figure someone has done this before with varying success. At the extreme end I imagine someone could just design a dial with a centrifugal clutch that if spun beyond a certain speed clutches out permanently and locks the dial shaft. My limited understanding of anti-theft mechanisms in safes is they are generally destructive, making it impossible for anyone to open the safe once activated.

With traditional safe combination locks, it's kinda normal for them to be spun fairly fast.

Often to enter the first digit you often have to turn the wheel four full revolutions, the second digit three full revolutions and so on. So users will be trying to spin it pretty fast under normal operation.

Of course there are other solutions to autodialers. For example, making sure burglers can't spend 3 days with the safe waiting for the autodialer to run.

Not the hallmark of a resilient design.

If you are interested in safe cracking there are training tools available, at least for the consumer-style S&G locks.

https://www.sparrowslockpicks.ca/product_p/sdial.htm

(Sparrows makes good stuff, but note how the .com website doesn't list where they are actually located. The .ca is out and proud about their real address.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com