Written by Guest Poster Kirsten Goodwin
During his “Decoding the SmartKey” talk at ShmooCon, Shane Lawson provided an interesting look at the relatively small amount of money required to decode a lock that costs around a hundred dollars.
Most of the items used for decoding these locks— such as sewing needles and krazy glue—can be found at home. If you don’t have any of these items at home, the total cost for purchasing them will only set you back about five dollars. Out of everything, the most difficult thing to use would be a dremel (to create the decoder). Other than that however, it would only require time and practice.Â
According to Lawson, a skilled person could decode the lock three times in five minutes. Just imagine how someone of that skill level could access important data and be off and running before anyone would notice or be able to do anything about it.Â
Shane Lawson also mentioned that many of the locks that require some sort of biometric entry—such as fingerprint scanners or key code entry—really are not any more secure than a regular lock. The same is true for locks that have a key lock attached to them; someone can still gain access as long as the conventional key lock is there.
Kirsten’s Bio: Kirsten Goodwin is a graduate of Virginia Tech and has recently started working in Information Security focusing on vulnerability analysis for a large defense contractor. She is currently studying for SSCP exam with an anticipated completion date in June of 2009.
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