something new every day...

[madsamurai]

Here's something interesting... analyzing the sounds the key makes entering a lock to determine key bitting...

https://secalerts.co/article/now-a-smartphone-can-be-used-to-pick-the-lock-of-your-front-door/d9abdd3a

[edocdab]

That is quite worrying to some people, I'm sure!
Here we are mostly at the brick through window and crowbar level, so anything subtle doesn't change that much here. But the possibilities of exploiting that technique are vast elsewhere I expect.

[MartinHewitt]

Government agencies banning pin tumbler locks worldwide.

[ZeroSumGame]

Kinda along the same lines, some MIT people published a paper about using a long distance high speed camera to film objects in a room that were vibrating due to people speaking such at plant leaves or potato chip bags. They were then able to turn the vibrations back into sound using software and eavesdrop on the targets.
Easy, every day bypasses and technologies don't spring up fully formed. They are built on the work prototypers and researchers do.
Anyway, fascinating stuff. Thanks for the link.

[GWiens2001]

I wonder how it would work on Medeco decoding.

Gordon

[mastersmith]

How about Mul-T-Lock pin within a pin? This is going to take some mighty discriminating software. With all the possibilities out there, a different version for each manufacturer?

[keymaster1053]

I wonder how it would work on Medeco decoding.

Gordon

I would venture to say you may get the depths of each pin, but no way could you get the angle. as a matter of fact, if a pin is turned a different direction than the others, it may give a different sound, so it may not even work for depth. interesting.
Jim

[madsamurai]

lol, you guys and your details I was impressed enough that they figured out how to use a phone mic to differentiate between the sounds of different length pins in a standard pin tumbler... little bit of genius there, at least. I think realistically it's pretty useless as an attack, you'd have to be right next to the person opening the lock and holding your phone up to the door when they put the key in, which seems like it might be just a little conspicuous... and I'm sure those sounds are going to vary from different manufacturers, or new vs worn locks, and maybe a hundred other factors. Still I think it's a very interesting concept, and if it can be used (somewhat) successfully for decoding pin tumblers perhaps it can be used similarly for other things, like manipulating group 2M safe locks (we've discussed using sound analysis with those already), or maybe as a picking assistant that could differentiate between serrated pin gaps and a good set... could have some potential as a useful tool if they build on it, and has me thinking of some experiments I'd like to try myself...

[keymaster1053]

Great Minds Think Alike.

[entropy]

Just skimmed the paper. I can't tell whether they tried it on real audio. Relevant sentence from the paper: "As clicks occur from real-world acoustic signals as depicted in Figure 3(a), we simulate such click timeseries for all possible victim keys in the pool, and obtain their corresponding set of candidate keys". So "real-world acoustic signals" certainly sounds like they used real audio. But this is in a section titled "Simulation Setup and Implementation" so... not real audio? And they tested it on 330424 different keys. I doubt they physically cut that many keys. And I'd expect if they actually tried it experimentally they'd be listing the make and model of the phone in the excruciating detail typical of such papers.

Also this: "SpiKey is able to provide 5.10 candidate keys guaranteeing inclusion of the correct victim key from a total of 330,424 keys, with 3 candidate keys being the most frequent case" (emphasis theirs). Inclusion of the correct key could only be guaranteed if it was a simulation.

In the abstract: "In this paper, we propose SpiKey, a novel attack that ..." So they are only proposing it? Also "As a proof-of-concept, we provide a simulation, based on real-world
recordings" So is it a simulation or real-world?

If they tried it on real audio and it worked, then I'm astonished. When you are inserting a key in a lock there is all sorts of metal flying all over. There is the passing of each key ridge across each pin, which is what they are after. But also you are essentially bumping the lock when inserting the key. There will be pins jumping up and bouncing back down at indeterminate times. And metal tends to ring like a bell, at least to some extent. So you have one event still emitting sound when the next event happens. The part they talk about in the paper, working out where you expect the sounds to occur, is the easy part. The hard part is the signal processing to find the clicks in the mess of audio.

[entropy]

Hmm... Section 3.1 does have a paragraph on signal processing though. So, maybe they did try it on real audio? And a link to a spectrogram on Google Photos. First time I've ever seen that in a paper... didn't know links to photosharing sites were allowed.