Medeco "unpickable" locks picked and pwned

By Cory Doctorow at 5:31 am Monday, Aug 6

Dave sez, "So the formerly unpickable/unbumpable high security locks Medeco has made for 30 years and that are used everywhere from the White House to the Pentagon have been compromised with picking bumping. I took the photos, and was paid by Wired to do so (and to cover Defcon in general)."

To demonstrate their crack of Medeco's M3 lock for Wired News, Tobias took a lock and inserted one of the keys that he and his researchers designed from Medeco's codes. Then he hit it several times with a bump hammer and turned the key.

The deadbolt was opened just as quickly with an even simpler technique using the wire shim and screwdriver. Tobias pointed out, however, that this cracking technique works only on deadbolts that have a single-sided key entry with a flip switch on one side, not on deadbolts that require a key on both sides of the lock.

Link (Thanks, Dave!)