A Robot At DEFCON Cracked A Safe Within 30 Minutes (bbc.com)

schwit1 shared an article from the BBC: Using a cheap robot, a team of hackers has cracked open a leading-brand combination safe, live on stage in Las Vegas. The team from SparkFun Electronics was able to open a SentrySafe safe in around 30 minutes... After the robot discovered the combination was 51.36.93, the safe popped open -- to rapturous applause from the audience of several hundred... The robot, which cost around $200 to put together, makes use of 3D-printed parts that can be easily replaced to fit different brands of combination safe. It cannot crack a digital lock -- although vulnerabilities in those systems have been exposed by other hacking teams in the past.
Though the safe had a million possible combinations using three two-digit numbers, the last number had slightly larger indents on the dial -- reducing the possible combinations to just 10,000. And in addition, "the team also discovered that the safe's design allows for a margin of error to compensate for humans getting their combination slightly wrong" -- which meant that the robot only had to check every third number. "Using this method, they could cut down the number of possible combinations to around 1,000."

"Some SentrySafe models come with an additional lock and key, but the team was able to unlock it by using a Bic pen."

Comments

My Sentry safe model 1250..

[Anonymous Coward]

was broken into in the less than twenty minutes between when someone kicked in my door and the Seattle police responded. They took everything in it. Sentry makes horrible safes.

Re: My Sentry safe model 1250..

[dunkelfalke]

Maybe where you come from, but German police is trained to shoot to stop. This is one of the reasons why in Germany only about 12 persons per year get shot to death by the police. German police is also trained to only shoot as ultima ratio when there is no other way to stop a person instead of using their firearm when they are scared. This is why many German cops never once have shot at people during their decades-long carreer.

Very Cool Application

[mykepredko]

I know this isn't at the level of what you'd see in a James Bond movie, but neither is the Sentry safe.

Congratulations to the team at SparkFun!

Re:Sounds like they watched a few Richard Feynman

[Registered Coward v2]

Exactly. The stories of his safe cracking in Surely You're Joking... are great. That book and they follow-on should be required reading for anyone interested in hacking, in the old school meaning of the term.

Re:So, not surprised they're not all that secure

[arth1]

Many of the Sentry safes can be opened in seconds with a powerful magnet. They're useful for keeping honest people honest, and give moderate protection from fires, depending on placement.
Mechanical safes are generally safer (no pun intended) than keypad ones, but there are still lots of exploits for quite a few of the common safe models.