Keys and locks are only symbols, not security.

http://lockbumping.org

http://lockchoice.com/CFS-1700_Fingerprint_Keypad_Door_Lock.html

Locomodem, if that’s the case then why does Medeco themselves say “Medeco3 is our premier brand technology?” They were using Medeco3 locks in the video. I don’t see a lot of detail on the keys they’re using, so can’t comment on their specifics. But keep in mind the keys they’re using are generic ground-down “bump keys” and not the keys that are cut to operate the lock. So any side bar cuts are not going to be present or will be cut all the way down.

Everybody happy, no?

Granted, he is indeed a central figure in the lock security world (his second edition of Locks, Safes and Security is the Bible of lockpicking), but many of the achievements attributed to him in fact come out from the German and Dutch lockpicking communities and other lockpickers (bump key method, breaking the Kryptonite lock etc etc). That’s another issue that recently he puts effort into make them public in the US. The emphasis is on recently, he is a relative late-comer in the “let’s make security loopholes public” mentality, where the lead was again taken by organizations like toool. No problem with that, I’m just saying that the single-hero-who-fights-the-establishment picture is a bit uneven-handed.

Tobias fame doesn’t need to be unnecessarily boasted, his own achievements are plenty enough. This Medeco break is sweet (although here again the Venezuelan Tobias should get more credit in my opinion)!

Is there such a thing as open source lock design? If there isn’t, there should be!

And we all know how innovative quasi-monopolies are…

THEN they would have credibility.

AWESOME news.

So my conclusion is that Abloy locks are hip, that in the US there’s basically no likelihood that a criminal will have the necessary tools, and that worrying any further is pointless. Lesson learned.

Medeco ought to be sued for actively working against the public good instead of accepting reality and educating their customers. How are they currently morally different from a drug company that conceals new studies about dangerous side effects? Or those corporate douchebags in the bisphenol-a thread?

It’s bad business, it’s immoral and it’s wrong.

As the owner of a Stanley Fubar, I’ve always known that locks are a provisional, social-contract-required thing at best. There are hand tools available to law enforcement (and anyone else, by extension) that trump your locks, no matter how “unpickable” they are.

My strategy is to own nothing mission-critical that is also stealable.

As for the picking itself, I’m always impressed by how few tools they use. I understand the principle of lockpicking barrel chambers, so it looked like they were using a zero-key to lift the pins, bumping them up whilst under tension, then working them individually into the gap with a lockpick.

Personally I have two doors, one with an inverted yale, and a second with a yale and a mortice lock. Then there’s an alarm. The back door setup is much the same. All the windows are PVC framed, double glazed. None of this stopped me climbing in through an open window when growing up.

I designed and built a tool to both decode and pick Medeco Classic, Biaxial, and m3. I released my research publicly around the same time Marc did (Defcon 16 and The Last Hope). I approached Medeco and they actually responded positively. They upgraded the pins to resist my attack (and numerous others by extension) and began installing them in all new cylinders and pin kits. Marc’s attacks were not met with the same results at all.

I’m not saying Medeco is a great company or anything, but they are definitely not ignoring all threats from the locksport/lockpicking community.

Here is a page about the tool and the company’s response: http://theamazingking.com/medecoder.html

-JKtheCJer/Jon King