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PIN-Cracking Robot To Be Showed Off At Defcon
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "At the Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas early next month, security researchers Justin Engler and Paul Vines plan to show off the R2B2, or Robotic Reconfigurable Button Basher, a piece of hardware they built for around $200 that can automatically punch PIN numbers at a rate of about one four-digit guess per second, fast enough to crack a typical Android phone's lock screen in 20 hours or less. Engler and Vines built their bot, shown briefly in a preview video, from three $10 servomotors, a plastic stylus, an open-source Arduino microcontroller, a collection of plastic parts 3D-printed on their local hackerspace's Makerbot 3D printer, and a five dollar webcam that watches the phone's screen to detect if it's successfully guessed the password. The device can be controlled via USB, connecting to a Mac or Windows PC that runs a simple code-cracking program. The researchers plan to release both the free software and the blueprints for their 3D-printable parts at the time of their Def Con talk."
When I don't even see the word - cloud - in the story?
Cloud it up man! Send those pins to the cloud!
By default all you need to is swipe to unlock. That's a far simpler robot.
My PIN is 9999, it'll be the last number it could possibly try!
And I'm sure in the 20 hours it takes to get that far, someone will notice and say "hey, Bob, why is there an android trying to break into your Android phone?"
My robot can crack a typical Android phone's screen with just one vigorous hit!
Nuffsaid
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Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
Or, just don't hand your phone to people carrying silly looking robot parts that want to borrow your device for "19 hours".
Problem solved!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!