make sure to submit a patent! once you show it to the world, in the US you have 1 yr to file a patent until that idea becomes unpatentable also Lock Picking Lawyer ?
I don't think the world needs more "unpickable lock" designs because there are numerous already, and they all provide a degree of deterrence while being defeatable and so will any lock ever made. What it needs is more manufacturers following well known established product quality and safety practices. And it needs people in charge of buying to care. You can't change either by introducing another lock.
Maybe trying stiffer springs and/or varying the stiffness might allow the lock to be able to resist those kinetic attacks. A stiffer spring should make it require more force and different stiffnesses might also mess with those attempts if you couple it with spooled or serrated pins.
I just watched all three of your videos, very entertaining and I'm really impressed at how simple your design is. I'm looking forward to see more updates!
I loved your lock and ornithopter videos. Definitely an inspiration for me to get started and throw a lock design up here on UA-cam. Thanks for the comment!
Instead of offering 'matched' topper plates. just drop two toppers into random pin slots, any key thus made should be made wrong by preventing decoding by trial and error.
You're probably doing this already, but there should be a guard in place to protect the watchdog pin. Without that someone can shove a shim with a detachable tip all the way into the back and jam the watchdog permanently open, then glue together the two parts of the core and pick as normal. This is technically a bit destructive, but since it preserves all the locking/unlocking functionality of the lock and only damages its pick resistance it's still stealthy.
you could add a dead pin that does not get hit by the key, similar to the watchdog pin. this pin is set to the correct height by default, so hammering the lock would bounce it out of position and bind the core, making it unable to open
Hmm I don’t think that would work vs hammering since between blows it could resettle. For my money we machine in lock bars which go along the keyway’s outer shell and limit the top pins travel
@@mjp121 maybe you could machine a specific offset which would make this anti bump pin bind specifically before any other pin would, basically like what the tolerance does to allow the other pins to bind, but in this pin it would jam the lock instead, making all other pins just fall back down, not binding at all during a bump
what if the pin was slightly convex, that way any bump would cause the pin to push itself away from the center, and would only fall back into place when tension is removed
Hi, I'm in a locksport and found your videos. I'm very interested in what you are doing and think it is worth while to continue. Thanks for expending the effort! 😁
Not only are you taking an open and thorough approach to designing this lock, but you also present it in a clear and professional manner. Great work! I hope your lock design improves and that more people find you.
Please keep this project going, I'm sure that there are a lot of people interested in your work that would be willing to actually use it if it achieves total picking protection.
A common defense for kinetic attacks and bumping are to just vary the springs on the pins. You might give that a try. A cerated or spooled pin might also possibly bind more reliable during such an attack.
Wow! That's brilliant! It's so simple and effective at the same time! I'm looking forward to seeing your lock on the LockPickingLawyer's table. StuffMadeHere and WorksByDesign locks are extremely complex, but your design uses almost stock parts with only small complications. So exited to see more .
I am very impressed with your understanding of locks and hacking techniques. Most people are unable to think in a complex way that is not based on their beliefs. Very nice.
Subscribed. Your attention to detail and hard work really shine through. It's clear that you put a lot of effort into making everything high-quality, and it doesn't go unnoticed. Your sharp mind and insightful commentary make your content stand out from the rest. Keep up the amazing work; you have a unique talent, and I can't wait to see what you do next!
Just binged all 3 videos on this lock and was mindblown to see that they’re your first videos. Without having looked I’d be certain this was a channel with subscribers in the millions. Fantastic in both presentation and demonstration!
You’re an amazing educator mate, the diagrams, props and the like you made for explaining the mechanisms were super helpful to understand it all better
Well this is all super cool, and I'm real impressed by the degree of professional engineering chops on display here - Most projects like this are presented from a way less technical perspective. For my two cents, I immediately suspect a second form of kinetic attack might be possible: By taking the opposite approach and setting all pins to the minimum height, a kinetic impact could potentially bounce the whole wafer stack around until it bound in the normal keyed position.
I'm a security nerd and engineer for a living and love your approach to this. From a pinning perspective, locksmiths like easy to follow instructions - A chart of valid pinnings is not going to be easy to follow. Not sure of another solution to the problem, just thinking this solution isn't it. Maybe go with a random variety of spring strengths?
Always good to see well-thought-through activity in this space. Thoughts: I'd be curious to see a comparison with Enclave, the only prior attempt at an unpickable lock I've seen that looks good to my eyes. Both approaches have some unwanted extra complexity, but they trade off differently. I've always been a bit skeptical of dual-core designs being commercially viable, which is an advantage of Enclave. I love how pragmatic the watchdog pin is. I think you should be scared of bypasses though. They're coming from two sides, as well. Against bumping attacks, you want the watchdog pin to be first to reset, so that it can't get stuck in the set position while you're picking other pins. Against forced rotation of the outer core (if an attacker got access, which seems plausible), you want it to be the first to bind, so the other pins can't be decoded. In contrast I'm really not a fan of the clocking pin, it seems so clunky. I think you should be able to just repurpose the watchdog pin to fill the same role. Make the bottom pin slightly oversized, and bring the cam down appropriately. When you want to start rotating the inner core, bring the cam up to full height. This will catch on the pin and force the inner core to rotate. To return on the other side of the cam you skip the inner step. I'm happy to explain in more detail if that wasn't clear. I had some designs floating around my head for a manufacturable unpickable lock since a while before it became a popular topic with StuffMadeHere and co., so I'm pretty engaged in the topic and would be excited to see more forward movement in any of this. My own ideas had their own ups and downs, and I think the newer stuff I'm seeing out of your lock and Enclave is better than what I came up with.
Watched all of your 3 videos. Your way to explain things with simple cardbord cutouts is incredible! Also i am impressed about the genius way to improve the lock. Instead of adding a New part i would rather use different driver pin length.
If you do succeed in foiling bumping, raking, and kinetic attacks, don't forget to try magnets. That seems to be a common way to defeat locks that resist mechanical attacks, and is often how electronic locks are defeated. I subscribed and am looking forward to your next video in this series! 🙂
Make sure that the watchdog driver pin is the thightest in the whole lock. That way you cannot apply very light tension and feel/decode the stack against the shearline edge. Another way to try to make the shearline easier to feel in the stack is to push the core inwards or pull it outwards. Due tolerances required to allow the parts to move, there will be always small amount of play in every direction so all directions can be used to pick or decode the lock.
Exellent video series, all very proffesional. well planned. Great choice of project, I made a Bramah copy 40 years ago after finding a drawing in a lock book with a description on how it had remained unpicked for 61 years and finally took 51 hours. it has binding sliders. Impressive coverage of attack methods. Victorian patents are fascinating.
Nice work, looks like you’ve got a good design. I believe the lock could still be “float picked” where careful tension control is used to hold the core just past a neutral position and different combinations attempted. It would still be a lengthy pick, testing the possibilities but could still be picked.
Thanks for the comment. I would love to understand this strategy better. With the core just past the neutral position, would be brute forcing the key combinations? Or just each of the possibilities of an individual pin stack?
@@BuiltDifferentDesigns it would depend on the feedback the lock gives. I could test a combination, move the core to test for open then manually counter rotate the core back testing each pin until I can find one that allows me to move a pin one more position and then test again. This is an extremely tedious process and time consuming so in real world scenarios it would be “practically” unpickable without knowing the bitting on the key. Unfortunately a lock with this many master wafers would struggle with reliability issues in real world uses as the thinnest wafers can flip and turn as wear and dirt are introduced to the lock. Picking can also cause this issue.
@@BuiltDifferentDesigns I would recommend sending a copy to Georgia Jim to pick if you want to see if the lock can be picked, he's picked so many locks, many that are much higher difficulty than LPL. I would recommend sending a copy to LPL to see if it's vulnerable to other attack vectors such as bypasses, but Jim is the one to see if it's vulnerable to picking.
Yes that would be time consuming and perhaps a set of tryout keys could also work. However KW1 has some limitations regrading the number of valid keys 5^6 = 7776 theoretical keys down to 6306 with a MACS of 4. That is further cut down to 2969 with impact arrest stacks in position 2 and 4 (there is nuance here). I would like to go to a KW10/KW11 or even KW5. The geometry and size of quickset pins is particularly appealing. To your second point if I do continue to pursue this idea, a study of the wear over time would be conducted to determine failure modes and monitor what wear would look like over the lifetime of the lock.
@@BuiltDifferentDesigns you could also look at other common key systems like SC4 (6 pin Schlage) which has more pin heights to give you more bitting options.
I want this lock to be out there, even if it’s not perfect it’s a far cry better than the other locks made. Lock companies will only improve their locks if they have the competition to make the do so.
Please continue this, if you can. I would absolutely love to see you succeed with your design and market this product and, hopefully, displace the "security" companies by offering a product that actually works and gives us actual security rather than the illusion of security.
Really cool project. Very well made clear videos. Was very suprised to see these were your first 3 videos. Feel like they are made by someone who hs been doing this for a while. Cheers.
Instead of adding inverse master topper pins to the top of the stack to prevent decoding, why not add random sized scrambler pins so that it decodes completely incorrectly? Would be a lot funnier if a decoding attack seemed possible but turns out to be one big waste of time. Plus it's simpler for manufacturing as you no longer have to make a specific topper for each stack. Great series by the way I really enjoyed it. There are companies out there who have entire departments working on each section of this project - concept, design, tolerances, printing, machining, costing through iterations and min/maxig price/quality etc. And here you are doing it as a one man show.
imagine the lock of your combined with the second lock of ,,works by design,, and the lock from ,,Stuff made here,, together. I don’t even know if this would work. You 3 should work together to make the most secure and complicated lock of all time.
I don't think he is aiming for complexity for the sake of complexity. He's trying to keep it as simple as possible as complexity requires greater adherence to tolerances. He's trying to show that lock makers could make a lock that is more secure if they really wanted to.
Great video, very well presented content. I hope that in the future, after a few changes in filming and editing techniques, this channel will be very popular.
I know that not everyone lives where they can invest in the sort of security that we have to protect our home, but we have two big furry noisy solutions that don't take kindly to strangers unless we tell them to. We have to keep them charged up all the time, it's about fifty bucks a month for that, and they need attention several times a day. They need to be let outside to purge themselves, and their mommy has to escort them up and down the street in the evening to make sure nothing untoward is happening in our neighborhood, but they are very effective at securing our homestead - even when we're all here! Heck, I even love these two pieces of ancient technology like they're family and it will be a sad day when each of them breaks down and stops working. It's not cheap maintaining them, and they can be time consuming, but they're our furry boys and they aren't afraid to put in work to earn their keep. P.S. The production quality has gone off the rails on this channel! Dial it back if it means putting more content up! ;]
This is amazing! Keep it up, the design is cool and it would be amazing to see you iterate on it and collaborate with the locksport community to refine and simplify the design.
Damn, you only have 3 videos and 500 subs? This video was recommended to me and I only noticed halfway through, I would have never guessed that, great job and I would love to see more!
This is one of the most interesting videos in the series! Learnt a lot about different attacks. Shame it hasn't caught the same algorithm bump as the other two. If you don't bring this to market - then releasing the design as open source, so anyone could produce them, in a way that other manufacturers couldn't patent, would be a great public service!
I remember a lock on LPL, might have been a mod he did himself, where if you attempted to pick the lock and got it wrong, a wafer would drop into a slot and permanently jam the lock. I've always liked that approach because it leaves evidence of a break in attempt, as well as being virtually impossible to pick (equivalent to trying to guess a short password with only 1 attempt, you might get it, but almost definitely not)
I've seen a document that suggested replacing the last spring with a silicone o-ring cut and straightened out. I guess the theory is that it will compress but it will also buckle and scrape along the edge of the tube, slowing it down. I don't know how silicone ages, though, or if it would rub down over time and stop working. My own silly design was to turn the whole thing upside-down so the springs are at the bottom, make the driver pin slightly undersized, and then fill the cavity with oil. This way the pin will move, but only as fast as it can squeeze oil around the outside. However, this would require periodic topping up as the oil dried off, and would eventually become gummed up with metal filings and old oil. What you really want is a velocity-limited spring as a hermetic, long-life component you could just drop in there. Like a memory foam or a non-newtonian, dilatant fluid and a way to keep it in place.
Also, I've wondered about just using heterogeneous springs. So that each pin stack jumps at a different speed and they all line up with the shear line at different times so there's no single moment at which all the stacks are open. I don't think it's realistic to have springs with such different characteristics that this would work, though. But maybe?
I have seen a locksmith try to pick a lock in the field. It took him like 30 min, when he was trying different tools and methods of attack. Like he had a really jagged key, which he was hammering into the lock. He tried regular picking. He tried raking. He did manage to pick it, but it took him a long time, and he did make a lot of noise. And the lock was a regular European cylinder. Perhaps he wasn't as skilled as some UA-camrs. Or perhaps picking locks on the field is much more difficult than doing it in a controlled environment, but it FEELS like most locks aren't as insecure as they are made out to be... at least not the ones in Europe.
I had that once here in Australia, calling a locksmith out to get me back into my apartment. The door had a deadlatch (which I had bought from the hardware store) and a passthrough (which I'd had re-keyed to match the deadlatch). Nothing too fancy, and from memory the passthrough (doorknob) wasn't even locked. Locksmith came out, spent a few minutes trying and failing to open the deadlatch with a pick gun (which was really loud). Then he stopped, looked at me, and said "hang on, did you say they're keyed the same?" (which I had said when he first arrived). Then he removed the barrel from the passthrough lock, took it out to his van, disassembled it, and cut me a new key to match the pinning on that barrel. Reassembled the barrel, confirmed that the key worked in that, confirmed that the key worked in the deadlatch, and then reinstalled the barrel in the passthrough. Entirely competent locksmith, no question. Lesson for me is that locksmiths aren't necessarily skilled at lockpicking per se. And yeah I reckon LPL could have opened that deadlatch silently within half a minute, but that's because he's put a huge amount of time and effort into developing that specific skillset.
On the question of how secure most locks really are, I think the answer is that in practice most criminals aren't going to bother trying to pick the lock in the first place. They're going to go straight for a destructive attack, or an easier and/or more discreet entry point.
1 or 2 security pins (e.g. spools or serrated pins) and varied driver springs would also help with kinetic attacks, I feel. You could also have a set pin in the back that isn't interacted by the key, but still has a taper to it, so that a kinetic attack dislodges it and binds the mid-core. Adding a front overhang/plate to the outer core to cover the watchdog pin would also help in a mildly destructive attack, where someone shoves and breaks a piece of something under the pin to bypass it, then link the 2 corse together or just doing a traditional pick.
Though you solved the lift and rap attack, I believe the design is still vulnerable to a kinetic attack. Particularly a bumping attack done in combination with a plug spinner. In this attack unlike normal bumping tension would not be applyed before striking the pins, rotation only begins after the pins have been hit. The plug spinner would allow the rotation of the core fast enough to reach the clocking. While it may be possible to perform this attack with two separate tools such as a snap gun and plug spinner, the timing required makes that highly unlikely. A new tool where the two are combined would be more plausible. As this requires new tooling to be designed, and other locks would be similarly vulnerable, I don't believe this detracts from the security of your design. Further the innovation of new tools to attack your design shows how well you have guarded against traditional attack vectors. Well done! I hope to see this project continue, your innovation is great to see!
This is quite interesting, when I saw things are made here design I felt like it’s too complicated, but this one is very simplistic and it seems more resilient, impressive!
There's an inherent flaw in this design in that you allow the attacker to interact with the real shear line from the beginning. That can't be good. The real shear line should be interacted with only after the stacks are no longer movable, so the picker can never directly interact with the challenge stage.
I had an idea once for a key design that has a single key go through a two-phase system, The first is monodirectional and very limited, 90 degree turn in order to reach the real access point, in pushing the key deeper, the flat key portion leaves the access of the initial keyway, and the tubular portion of the key occupies the space around the initial lock rotation, the flat portion now engages with the second half of the lock which rotates independently of the first half and can be further rotated in order to unlock, or in the other direction to lock, then you have to return the deeper lock to it's origin to retract the key to it's surface core, and then return that to the origin position in order to remove the key entirely.
Really nice clean design. In the vein of a few other locks that have been proposed of late focused on separating the testing from the setting. I think the two parts of your design that make it less commercially viable than it would appear are as follows. 1) In its current form it is a one way lock so you can not lock the bolt using the key. limits the applications 2) is the size of the core, Making new hardware to fit a new cylinder is not a commercially viable thing to do at this point in the lock business.
Not being able to lock the deadbolt with a key is a bigger issue than you might expect. Rental property owners deliberately use a deadbolt along with a passage doorknob (doorknob does not lock) so that the renters cannot lock themselves out without using the key. The key might still get lost or stolen, but otherwise the renter can’t be locked out accidentally.
I did just finnish watching your videos, I loved them and they are great, I have seen this kind of design for a lock before called a co-axial lock by Andy Pugh, I would call it a sleeved core, anyway I would approach it with a type of float picking method as mentioned before, it could take some time but to me it would seem possible to get it picked, keep up the great work
Kinetic attacks, I might've known. I am impressed with your design so far but it is quite an undertaking to make an unpickable lock. Once you're confident in it, definitely send this in to LPL
Hello You can still combine the attack where you bind the core and the mid-core, and while the core is lightly gummed up, use a kinetic attack to move the watchdog pin out of the way. Then it becomes a regular lock again Visualize hitting the bottom with a hammer at 2:33
Picking is still very possible here. All you'd need to do is pick everything that binds up to the watchdog pin, de-stick the inner core and continue rotating it so the watchdog pin gets set, keep the outer core in tension so it stays set, rotate the inner core back, and finally pick the last few pins while the outer core is still being tensioned. This can be completely fixed by having the watchdog pin lower instead of raise. That way there's no way to get anything that would bind after the watchdog pin to bind in the setting phase... at all. The watchdog pin will only ever be set when the relevant shear line is completely inaccessible in this case. That is, unless someone somehow _removes_ the material holding it up that high. With no ability for pins (which would bind after the watchdog pin, which is ideally all of them) to bind while in the setting phase, any and all decoding via the shear line is impossible, so you couldn't even take some hybrid approach where you use something like a lishi tool and who knows what else to use the binding to tell you the bitting. Zipping, I think would work for setting any pins that would bind before the watchdog pin, just so long as you are tensioning the outer core (perhaps via sticking it to the inner core and tensioning that, or just by directly touching the outer core through touching around or through a pin or something). If the watchdog pin needs to _fall_ to be set, that means the zipped pins will have to fall too, thus leaving no time when the shear line can actually be accessed through a zipping attack, no matter how fast you try rotating the lock. Both slow zip and fast zip are thwarted here. Do you think the hammer attack would fail due to bumping the watchdog pin (if it was to lower)? I'd guess no, but in any case, this particular attack can easily be countered by not allowing anything other than the top of the master pins to access the shear line. If you just make the master pins longer or decrease the amount of possible vertical movement, the master pins just wouldn't be able to be moved up that high.
For clarity about my solution to the hammer attack, let's say the difference between the lowest bitting of your key and the highest bitting of your key is x. You only really need to provide maybe slightly more than x vertical movement in the pin stack. Let's say you provide vertical space x+h over which your pin stack can move. When you push the key pins all the way up (as in, the pins are hitting the top and pressing into fully compressed springs), all the top-of-master-pin lines will be in a region of size x at h above your shear line. If your master pins are such that your smallest master pin is larger than h, then there is no way for the bottom of the master pins to be used at all. Only the line at the top of the master pins can be separated when opening the lock. So basically, if you fix the spacing issue, there's not even any room for any shear line in the pin stack to be used other than the ones at the tops of the master pins. Since decoding via pin stack size is fixed too, that's two birds with one stone.
Looks like a shim could be inserted between the cores from the front on the lock. Not sure what that would achieve but I'd ensure there is no gap there to be safe
I absolutely love this lock design, it’s simplicity, it’s ease of manufacturability, it’s thought about pin compatibility. However, your design I think may have one issue, your lock body might not be compatible with some lock housings because of how beefy your lock body is. So you might not be able to install your lock on some standard housings like an Abus housing or some other standard housings. I’d be interested to see if you could design your lock to be more flexible in this regard.
Watchdog attack: - Lift the watchdog pin by inserting a long tool and pushing it up, fixing it in place (glue or wedging) - Attach core and midcore together (glue or wedging) - With the separation of setting and testing thwarted, regular lockpicking may commence
I’m no expert but I feel with all these smart parts in a lock, there are a lot that can go wrong. The tiny little disk pins could tip over and lock up. You mentioned in another video that machines are not precise and perfect, this also makes the lock more prone to jams in my eyes. You also mentioned that it’s impossible to get the pins over the sheer line, but there are tools that pass a wire thru them. The wire is insert further in so that it can push the pins above the line. I believe Sparks and Code made a tool like one I just mentioned.
While the disc pins /could/ turn, it's nor something you would expect for a few reasons, A. it's marketed as a door lock so the normative forces are limited, B. it's under load from the springs, C they're in a column, All of which is too say even if they shift slightly they'll be pushed back, a worse? case is using a malformed key and them getting gummy in the lock turning, but again they'll naturally realign because they are in the __ form, they need a LOT of space to get to the I, or even /, and in that case they would still be prone to going flat again if jossled because the key pins are blocks N that can't be turned sideways. All of this is assuming the wafers are thin enough that they can be turned at all. if it's I==I the thickness will stop turning like any of the larger pins.
a possible improvement is to put pins inside the springs - this can prevent over-lifting attacks , also against kinetic use different strengths of springs
I just saw your "how to build" video in my recommendations, and would like to offer my thoughts. Your design is very similar to one I suggested on a lock picker's forum a few years ago, and I doubt I was the first to think of it. A critical flaw someone pointed out that I'm surprised you haven't yet run into is that unless the tolerances between the wafers and pin stacks are very tightly controlled, it's possible for wafers to get jammed in a mis-aligned state if there's ever any slack space between them. If that were to happen in a lock, it may be impossible to ever open it again without access to the tops of the pin stacks. I've had some other ideas for variations of "sample then test" locks if you'd be interested, but I'm not sure how best to share them.
Here's an extra idea for you to think about. If percussion attacks work on joggling the pins until something lines up, how about adding some extra protection pins around the shear line that are actually held on weak springs and end just fractionally clear of the shear line say at 120 degree intervals around the circumference. Banging the lock, whilst you may line the tumblers up for a millisecond would likely also vibrate one of the protection pins into the shear line, jamming it in place for the same millisecond and thus defeating a percussion attack. Not sure if I have explained this very well, hopefully you get the idea.
I think there's a lot to be done by changing your unlocking mechanism and your key shape. See Swiss door locks, they're incredible. Maybe also just change the key shape to have some part of the key pushing a mechanism lateraly or horizontally to put all of the the vertical pins in a different position before being decoded. Basically, use all three dimensions instead of only one.
One idea that would more time consuming but still somewhat allows single pin picking is to set each pin stack to position 1,2, etc, rotate the lock and see if it falls into a deeper set. Since the movement on the core when setting a pin correctly is usually quite small, you would need something to actually measure this. Maybe simply putting a reference marking with a pencil on the core and body could be enough to see the difference though. This would require a lot more skill than a traditional pick, is more time consuming, is probably even with a lot of skill still error-prone, and could probably be mitigated entirely by using spules and/or serrated pins. You would probably also need a specialized tool to keep multiple pin stacks in the correct position at once
I like that the design addresses the issues but is also practical to manufacture. Nice work By the way in Europe thieves like to snap the lock. You should consider forceful rotation and core pulling attacks. I.e. reasonable levels of destructive defeats. Not valid for lock pickers but important for the real world.
Andy Pugh has a similar lock design, for which he says he has applied for a patent. These BDD videos are munh more descriptive than anything I found about Andy Pugh.
If you were up for precision engineering, you could make pins that act like rails with each other so that pins cannot separate vertically but can still slide when rotated
You could make a hollow cylinder that goes around the spring or a thin solid cylinder that goes within the spring so that the travel is limited but the preload is unchanged. Maybe
A vulnerability someone else pointed out is that the watchdog pin could be vulnerable to kinetic attacks so a combined method could be used, if someone connects the inner and outer cores they could knock it upwards then pick the other pins like normal furthermore I suspect the cammed surface might allow new kinetic attacks for the watchdog pin specifically, for example rotating the inner core breifly yet harshly to launch it up. A way to fix this would be to add a more limiting mechanical linkage, for example imagine a piston engine, the inner core is the "crankshaft", a connecting rod links an off center spoke attached to the rest of the inner core to the "piston", or watchdog pin, so only once it's pulled fully into the "cylinder", or outer core by the inner core turning far enough will they both be able to rotate. The machining might be a pain but it shouldn't be too bad. As a bonus since it's moving down instead of up and displacing a driver pin it wouldn't be possible to wedge the driver pin upwards somehow then turn the inner and outer core back into alignment, perhaps by an attacker adding friction between the inner and outer core so when turning it back the outer core continuously puts pressure in the reverse direction, keeping the driver from falling. I think you greatly underestimated how vulnerable it'd be overlifting attacks, based on what you showed there you wouldn't need to lift the stacks completely beyond the outer core, just high enough that the wafer stacks overlap the shear between the outer core and the body instead of between the inner and outer core. You did talk about that later in kinetic attacks but the solution you gave seems limited and limiting. You could limit the potential travel distance of the pins without needing the user to compress the springs completely by having a narrower section that can fit the springs but not the pins. For preventing decoding attacks why add additional master pins of variable length when you could just vary the length of the driver pins directly? Not a vulnerability, it just seems like an unessesary complication.
awesome video's fun and imformative but the problem with a unpickable lock is that if the lock is un pickable the window is still brickable or the wood door still crowbarable en the metal grindable, it's a good first defence but if people want to get in they will
This is one of the best series on locks I've seen on UA-cam. Thank you for your hard work! I would love to see this lock in production, and before that, purchase a prototype to play with. Any chance I could get one?
I have an idea for preventing impact attacks add a pin on the opposite side with an extension spring that will be easier to bind in the central core if force is applied. The thought being if the bump attack is performed that pin will engage and prevent the central core from turning beyond the lip of that security pin. So that pin would be like a spool pin, double mushroom pin, or a gin pin.( types of security pins used in locks currently. You could also theoretically let that be a gravity pin to keep costs down.
Nice design. If one would find a way to independently tension the outer core, one could just pick most pins normally and the last pin by twisting the inner core. Since I don't see how that would be done, I would not call it packable, but that is at least something to keep in mind.
Step 1: Make a metal version, either DIY, that is get all the tools or find a makerspace or similar where you can do it or order it from somewhere that can do that sort of job. Step 2: Test, check, doublecheck everything works and repeat from Step 1 until you succeed. Step 3: Send it to the LPL :)
I think you could prevent drilling attacks if you make a rotating plate at the very beginning, which would rotate freely with the borers and install some carbide pins in the lock itself. But I don't know if there are any disadvantages
![[636] Bowley Lock Analysis and Update](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/qV8QKZNFxLw/mqdefault.jpg)
If you care about security and would be interested to see this lock further developed and brought to market. Like this comment.
make sure to submit a patent! once you show it to the world, in the US you have 1 yr to file a patent until that idea becomes unpatentable
also Lock Picking Lawyer ?
I'd like to see it developed and brought to LPL :)
Bro i want to buy this, if not at least release the design in something like creative common.
I don't think the world needs more "unpickable lock" designs because there are numerous already, and they all provide a degree of deterrence while being defeatable and so will any lock ever made. What it needs is more manufacturers following well known established product quality and safety practices. And it needs people in charge of buying to care. You can't change either by introducing another lock.
Maybe trying stiffer springs and/or varying the stiffness might allow the lock to be able to resist those kinetic attacks.
A stiffer spring should make it require more force and different stiffnesses might also mess with those attempts if you couple it with spooled or serrated pins.
I just watched all three of your videos, very entertaining and I'm really impressed at how simple your design is. I'm looking forward to see more updates!
I loved your lock and ornithopter videos. Definitely an inspiration for me to get started and throw a lock design up here on UA-cam. Thanks for the comment!
Came here from watching your video.
Instead of offering 'matched' topper plates. just drop two toppers into random pin slots, any key thus made should be made wrong by preventing decoding by trial and error.
You're probably doing this already, but there should be a guard in place to protect the watchdog pin. Without that someone can shove a shim with a detachable tip all the way into the back and jam the watchdog permanently open, then glue together the two parts of the core and pick as normal. This is technically a bit destructive, but since it preserves all the locking/unlocking functionality of the lock and only damages its pick resistance it's still stealthy.
In the diagram, it looks like the Watchdog pin is shielded. So, you can't shim it all the way to the back.
A related issue might be gluing the cores together and then using an impact to disengage the watchdog pin and allow rotation.
@@AlexRickabaugh using glue would have a high chance of making the entire lock seize up and permanently be unable to turn.
@ZachareSylvestre that's a fair point, maybe a different adhesive? Idk how well like hot glue would bind to it.
Yo, it's Bram Cohen, inventor of bit torrent, and twisty puzzle enthusiast/legend! How many puzzles has Oskar named after you?
you could add a dead pin that does not get hit by the key, similar to the watchdog pin. this pin is set to the correct height by default, so hammering the lock would bounce it out of position and bind the core, making it unable to open
Hmm I don’t think that would work vs hammering since between blows it could resettle. For my money we machine in lock bars which go along the keyway’s outer shell and limit the top pins travel
@@mjp121 maybe you could machine a specific offset which would make this anti bump pin bind specifically before any other pin would, basically like what the tolerance does to allow the other pins to bind, but in this pin it would jam the lock instead, making all other pins just fall back down, not binding at all during a bump
what if the pin was slightly convex, that way any bump would cause the pin to push itself away from the center, and would only fall back into place when tension is removed
These lock design innovation videos are some of the most interesting engineering videos on UA-cam
Great design. Would love to see TLPL take a shot at it once it is refined.
Being tested by the lock picking lawyer is pretty much a rite of passage before calling a lock (actually) pick proof.
Hi, I'm in a locksport and found your videos. I'm very interested in what you are doing and think it is worth while to continue.
Thanks for expending the effort! 😁
Not only are you taking an open and thorough approach to designing this lock, but you also present it in a clear and professional manner. Great work! I hope your lock design improves and that more people find you.
Lock companies _are_ listening. To their shareholders. They say " make the cheapest locks you can get away with".
exactly, the product should just look like what buyers see as a lock
Please keep this project going, I'm sure that there are a lot of people interested in your work that would be willing to actually use it if it achieves total picking protection.
A common defense for kinetic attacks and bumping are to just vary the springs on the pins. You might give that a try. A cerated or spooled pin might also possibly bind more reliable during such an attack.
Wow! That's brilliant! It's so simple and effective at the same time! I'm looking forward to seeing your lock on the LockPickingLawyer's table.
StuffMadeHere and WorksByDesign locks are extremely complex, but your design uses almost stock parts with only small complications. So exited to see more .
highlighting the reasons for why other attacks are preferable are a very interesting point!
I am very impressed with your understanding of locks and hacking techniques. Most people are unable to think in a complex way that is not based on their beliefs. Very nice.
Subscribed. Your attention to detail and hard work really shine through. It's clear that you put a lot of effort into making everything high-quality, and it doesn't go unnoticed. Your sharp mind and insightful commentary make your content stand out from the rest. Keep up the amazing work; you have a unique talent, and I can't wait to see what you do next!
Just binged all 3 videos on this lock and was mindblown to see that they’re your first videos. Without having looked I’d be certain this was a channel with subscribers in the millions. Fantastic in both presentation and demonstration!
You’re an amazing educator mate, the diagrams, props and the like you made for explaining the mechanisms were super helpful to understand it all better
Well this is all super cool, and I'm real impressed by the degree of professional engineering chops on display here - Most projects like this are presented from a way less technical perspective. For my two cents, I immediately suspect a second form of kinetic attack might be possible: By taking the opposite approach and setting all pins to the minimum height, a kinetic impact could potentially bounce the whole wafer stack around until it bound in the normal keyed position.
I'm a security nerd and engineer for a living and love your approach to this. From a pinning perspective, locksmiths like easy to follow instructions - A chart of valid pinnings is not going to be easy to follow. Not sure of another solution to the problem, just thinking this solution isn't it. Maybe go with a random variety of spring strengths?
Always good to see well-thought-through activity in this space.
Thoughts:
I'd be curious to see a comparison with Enclave, the only prior attempt at an unpickable lock I've seen that looks good to my eyes. Both approaches have some unwanted extra complexity, but they trade off differently. I've always been a bit skeptical of dual-core designs being commercially viable, which is an advantage of Enclave.
I love how pragmatic the watchdog pin is. I think you should be scared of bypasses though. They're coming from two sides, as well. Against bumping attacks, you want the watchdog pin to be first to reset, so that it can't get stuck in the set position while you're picking other pins. Against forced rotation of the outer core (if an attacker got access, which seems plausible), you want it to be the first to bind, so the other pins can't be decoded.
In contrast I'm really not a fan of the clocking pin, it seems so clunky. I think you should be able to just repurpose the watchdog pin to fill the same role. Make the bottom pin slightly oversized, and bring the cam down appropriately. When you want to start rotating the inner core, bring the cam up to full height. This will catch on the pin and force the inner core to rotate. To return on the other side of the cam you skip the inner step. I'm happy to explain in more detail if that wasn't clear.
I had some designs floating around my head for a manufacturable unpickable lock since a while before it became a popular topic with StuffMadeHere and co., so I'm pretty engaged in the topic and would be excited to see more forward movement in any of this. My own ideas had their own ups and downs, and I think the newer stuff I'm seeing out of your lock and Enclave is better than what I came up with.
i like that you try to make it as simple as possible so manufacturing would be posibble and its funny seeing how you deal with commenters
Watched all of your 3 videos. Your way to explain things with simple cardbord cutouts is incredible! Also i am impressed about the genius way to improve the lock. Instead of adding a New part i would rather use different driver pin length.
If you do succeed in foiling bumping, raking, and kinetic attacks, don't forget to try magnets. That seems to be a common way to defeat locks that resist mechanical attacks, and is often how electronic locks are defeated. I subscribed and am looking forward to your next video in this series! 🙂
Make sure that the watchdog driver pin is the thightest in the whole lock. That way you cannot apply very light tension and feel/decode the stack against the shearline edge. Another way to try to make the shearline easier to feel in the stack is to push the core inwards or pull it outwards. Due tolerances required to allow the parts to move, there will be always small amount of play in every direction so all directions can be used to pick or decode the lock.
Absolutely fantastic series. I am so impressed by how much detail you are able to fit into these ~15 minute videos.
very professional, I hope one day the security of regular locks progresses.
You should have way more subscribers than you currently do. The way you explain your ideas in your videos is fantastic.
Can't wait to see how far can you push this design and put in on the market. Will consider buying when it is available for purchase:).
Gotta say, I learned more about locks from watching your 3 videos than I did dozens of LPL videos!
Exellent video series, all very proffesional. well planned. Great choice of project, I made a Bramah copy 40 years ago after finding a drawing in a lock book with a description on how it had remained unpicked for 61 years and finally took 51 hours. it has binding sliders. Impressive coverage of attack methods. Victorian patents are fascinating.
Very interesting series, and well explained. I especially liked the cardboard models that you made in the first episode.
Nice work, looks like you’ve got a good design. I believe the lock could still be “float picked” where careful tension control is used to hold the core just past a neutral position and different combinations attempted. It would still be a lengthy pick, testing the possibilities but could still be picked.
Thanks for the comment. I would love to understand this strategy better. With the core just past the neutral position, would be brute forcing the key combinations? Or just each of the possibilities of an individual pin stack?
@@BuiltDifferentDesigns it would depend on the feedback the lock gives. I could test a combination, move the core to test for open then manually counter rotate the core back testing each pin until I can find one that allows me to move a pin one more position and then test again. This is an extremely tedious process and time consuming so in real world scenarios it would be “practically” unpickable without knowing the bitting on the key. Unfortunately a lock with this many master wafers would struggle with reliability issues in real world uses as the thinnest wafers can flip and turn as wear and dirt are introduced to the lock. Picking can also cause this issue.
@@BuiltDifferentDesigns I would recommend sending a copy to Georgia Jim to pick if you want to see if the lock can be picked, he's picked so many locks, many that are much higher difficulty than LPL. I would recommend sending a copy to LPL to see if it's vulnerable to other attack vectors such as bypasses, but Jim is the one to see if it's vulnerable to picking.
Yes that would be time consuming and perhaps a set of tryout keys could also work. However KW1 has some limitations regrading the number of valid keys 5^6 = 7776 theoretical keys down to 6306 with a MACS of 4. That is further cut down to 2969 with impact arrest stacks in position 2 and 4 (there is nuance here). I would like to go to a KW10/KW11 or even KW5. The geometry and size of quickset pins is particularly appealing. To your second point if I do continue to pursue this idea, a study of the wear over time would be conducted to determine failure modes and monitor what wear would look like over the lifetime of the lock.
@@BuiltDifferentDesigns you could also look at other common key systems like SC4 (6 pin Schlage) which has more pin heights to give you more bitting options.
I want this lock to be out there, even if it’s not perfect it’s a far cry better than the other locks made. Lock companies will only improve their locks if they have the competition to make the do so.
Please continue this, if you can. I would absolutely love to see you succeed with your design and market this product and, hopefully, displace the "security" companies by offering a product that actually works and gives us actual security rather than the illusion of security.
Definitely keep on this. I'm digging the actual in depth research. Also I wouldn't mind having a go at picking this bad boy if you're ok with it!
Thanks for this series of lock evolution. Very interesting. Good job!
Really cool project. Very well made clear videos. Was very suprised to see these were your first 3 videos. Feel like they are made by someone who hs been doing this for a while. Cheers.
Instead of adding inverse master topper pins to the top of the stack to prevent decoding, why not add random sized scrambler pins so that it decodes completely incorrectly? Would be a lot funnier if a decoding attack seemed possible but turns out to be one big waste of time. Plus it's simpler for manufacturing as you no longer have to make a specific topper for each stack.
Great series by the way I really enjoyed it. There are companies out there who have entire departments working on each section of this project - concept, design, tolerances, printing, machining, costing through iterations and min/maxig price/quality etc. And here you are doing it as a one man show.
imagine the lock of your combined with the second lock of ,,works by design,, and the lock from ,,Stuff made here,, together. I don’t even know if this would work. You 3 should work together to make the most secure and complicated lock of all time.
I don't think he is aiming for complexity for the sake of complexity. He's trying to keep it as simple as possible as complexity requires greater adherence to tolerances. He's trying to show that lock makers could make a lock that is more secure if they really wanted to.
Complexity is a negative in this case, this lock is supposed to be capable of cheap mass production.
Good job… 1 more video and almost ready for the loyer picker guy
soy cerrajero, de argentina, pienso igual q vos, nadie se preocupa en hacer modelos mas eficientes, segui asi!!!
Great video, very well presented content. I hope that in the future, after a few changes in filming and editing techniques, this channel will be very popular.
YES please keep it going!!! That is how good things are made. Someone putting his mind and attention to it!!
I know that not everyone lives where they can invest in the sort of security that we have to protect our home, but we have two big furry noisy solutions that don't take kindly to strangers unless we tell them to. We have to keep them charged up all the time, it's about fifty bucks a month for that, and they need attention several times a day. They need to be let outside to purge themselves, and their mommy has to escort them up and down the street in the evening to make sure nothing untoward is happening in our neighborhood, but they are very effective at securing our homestead - even when we're all here! Heck, I even love these two pieces of ancient technology like they're family and it will be a sad day when each of them breaks down and stops working. It's not cheap maintaining them, and they can be time consuming, but they're our furry boys and they aren't afraid to put in work to earn their keep.
P.S. The production quality has gone off the rails on this channel! Dial it back if it means putting more content up! ;]
This is amazing! Keep it up, the design is cool and it would be amazing to see you iterate on it and collaborate with the locksport community to refine and simplify the design.
Hoping to see the next iteration soon!😊
Damn, you only have 3 videos and 500 subs? This video was recommended to me and I only noticed halfway through, I would have never guessed that, great job and I would love to see more!
Absolutely savage drop at 4:36 😂🔥
This is one of the most interesting videos in the series! Learnt a lot about different attacks. Shame it hasn't caught the same algorithm bump as the other two.
If you don't bring this to market - then releasing the design as open source, so anyone could produce them, in a way that other manufacturers couldn't patent, would be a great public service!
I remember a lock on LPL, might have been a mod he did himself, where if you attempted to pick the lock and got it wrong, a wafer would drop into a slot and permanently jam the lock. I've always liked that approach because it leaves evidence of a break in attempt, as well as being virtually impossible to pick (equivalent to trying to guess a short password with only 1 attempt, you might get it, but almost definitely not)
definitely continue this! can't wait to see these things available.
The lesson you can learn from this is to fix your failures, just because it's weak to this attack it doesn't mean you can't fix it
You can mitigate kinetic attacks by using high viscosity grease on the innermost pin stack.
Interesting idea!
I've seen a document that suggested replacing the last spring with a silicone o-ring cut and straightened out. I guess the theory is that it will compress but it will also buckle and scrape along the edge of the tube, slowing it down. I don't know how silicone ages, though, or if it would rub down over time and stop working.
My own silly design was to turn the whole thing upside-down so the springs are at the bottom, make the driver pin slightly undersized, and then fill the cavity with oil. This way the pin will move, but only as fast as it can squeeze oil around the outside. However, this would require periodic topping up as the oil dried off, and would eventually become gummed up with metal filings and old oil.
What you really want is a velocity-limited spring as a hermetic, long-life component you could just drop in there. Like a memory foam or a non-newtonian, dilatant fluid and a way to keep it in place.
Also, I've wondered about just using heterogeneous springs. So that each pin stack jumps at a different speed and they all line up with the shear line at different times so there's no single moment at which all the stacks are open. I don't think it's realistic to have springs with such different characteristics that this would work, though. But maybe?
Please build a working prototype. You're on a mission, a great one!
I have seen a locksmith try to pick a lock in the field. It took him like 30 min, when he was trying different tools and methods of attack. Like he had a really jagged key, which he was hammering into the lock. He tried regular picking. He tried raking. He did manage to pick it, but it took him a long time, and he did make a lot of noise. And the lock was a regular European cylinder. Perhaps he wasn't as skilled as some UA-camrs. Or perhaps picking locks on the field is much more difficult than doing it in a controlled environment, but it FEELS like most locks aren't as insecure as they are made out to be... at least not the ones in Europe.
I had that once here in Australia, calling a locksmith out to get me back into my apartment. The door had a deadlatch (which I had bought from the hardware store) and a passthrough (which I'd had re-keyed to match the deadlatch). Nothing too fancy, and from memory the passthrough (doorknob) wasn't even locked.
Locksmith came out, spent a few minutes trying and failing to open the deadlatch with a pick gun (which was really loud). Then he stopped, looked at me, and said "hang on, did you say they're keyed the same?" (which I had said when he first arrived). Then he removed the barrel from the passthrough lock, took it out to his van, disassembled it, and cut me a new key to match the pinning on that barrel. Reassembled the barrel, confirmed that the key worked in that, confirmed that the key worked in the deadlatch, and then reinstalled the barrel in the passthrough. Entirely competent locksmith, no question.
Lesson for me is that locksmiths aren't necessarily skilled at lockpicking per se. And yeah I reckon LPL could have opened that deadlatch silently within half a minute, but that's because he's put a huge amount of time and effort into developing that specific skillset.
On the question of how secure most locks really are, I think the answer is that in practice most criminals aren't going to bother trying to pick the lock in the first place. They're going to go straight for a destructive attack, or an easier and/or more discreet entry point.
loving the series so far! keep it up!
1 or 2 security pins (e.g. spools or serrated pins) and varied driver springs would also help with kinetic attacks, I feel. You could also have a set pin in the back that isn't interacted by the key, but still has a taper to it, so that a kinetic attack dislodges it and binds the mid-core.
Adding a front overhang/plate to the outer core to cover the watchdog pin would also help in a mildly destructive attack, where someone shoves and breaks a piece of something under the pin to bypass it, then link the 2 corse together or just doing a traditional pick.
Though you solved the lift and rap attack, I believe the design is still vulnerable to a kinetic attack. Particularly a bumping attack done in combination with a plug spinner. In this attack unlike normal bumping tension would not be applyed before striking the pins, rotation only begins after the pins have been hit.
The plug spinner would allow the rotation of the core fast enough to reach the clocking.
While it may be possible to perform this attack with two separate tools such as a snap gun and plug spinner, the timing required makes that highly unlikely. A new tool where the two are combined would be more plausible.
As this requires new tooling to be designed, and other locks would be similarly vulnerable, I don't believe this detracts from the security of your design. Further the innovation of new tools to attack your design shows how well you have guarded against traditional attack vectors.
Well done! I hope to see this project continue, your innovation is great to see!
This is quite interesting, when I saw things are made here design I felt like it’s too complicated, but this one is very simplistic and it seems more resilient, impressive!
Scary to see how simple of a solution you made. If this is all thats needed to drastically improve it then modern locks are a scam
🔒🔒🔒Very cool, I hope this blows up, you just started but I actually like these videos just as much as LPL and SMH
There's an inherent flaw in this design in that you allow the attacker to interact with the real shear line from the beginning. That can't be good.
The real shear line should be interacted with only after the stacks are no longer movable, so the picker can never directly interact with the challenge stage.
I had an idea once for a key design that has a single key go through a two-phase system, The first is monodirectional and very limited, 90 degree turn in order to reach the real access point, in pushing the key deeper, the flat key portion leaves the access of the initial keyway, and the tubular portion of the key occupies the space around the initial lock rotation, the flat portion now engages with the second half of the lock which rotates independently of the first half and can be further rotated in order to unlock, or in the other direction to lock, then you have to return the deeper lock to it's origin to retract the key to it's surface core, and then return that to the origin position in order to remove the key entirely.
Really nice clean design. In the vein of a few other locks that have been proposed of late focused on separating the testing from the setting. I think the two parts of your design that make it less commercially viable than it would appear are as follows.
1) In its current form it is a one way lock so you can not lock the bolt using the key. limits the applications
2) is the size of the core, Making new hardware to fit a new cylinder is not a commercially viable thing to do at this point in the lock business.
Not being able to lock the deadbolt with a key is a bigger issue than you might expect. Rental property owners deliberately use a deadbolt along with a passage doorknob (doorknob does not lock) so that the renters cannot lock themselves out without using the key. The key might still get lost or stolen, but otherwise the renter can’t be locked out accidentally.
I did just finnish watching your videos, I loved them and they are great, I have seen this kind of design for a lock before called a co-axial lock by Andy Pugh, I would call it a sleeved core, anyway I would approach it with a type of float picking method as mentioned before, it could take some time but to me it would seem possible to get it picked, keep up the great work
Kinetic attacks, I might've known. I am impressed with your design so far but it is quite an undertaking to make an unpickable lock. Once you're confident in it, definitely send this in to LPL
Great design. Elegant even
Cant wait to see how this all pans out. I think youre on the right track 👍
Hello
You can still combine the attack where you bind the core and the mid-core, and while the core is lightly gummed up, use a kinetic attack to move the watchdog pin out of the way. Then it becomes a regular lock again
Visualize hitting the bottom with a hammer at 2:33
Picking is still very possible here. All you'd need to do is pick everything that binds up to the watchdog pin, de-stick the inner core and continue rotating it so the watchdog pin gets set, keep the outer core in tension so it stays set, rotate the inner core back, and finally pick the last few pins while the outer core is still being tensioned. This can be completely fixed by having the watchdog pin lower instead of raise. That way there's no way to get anything that would bind after the watchdog pin to bind in the setting phase... at all. The watchdog pin will only ever be set when the relevant shear line is completely inaccessible in this case. That is, unless someone somehow _removes_ the material holding it up that high.
With no ability for pins (which would bind after the watchdog pin, which is ideally all of them) to bind while in the setting phase, any and all decoding via the shear line is impossible, so you couldn't even take some hybrid approach where you use something like a lishi tool and who knows what else to use the binding to tell you the bitting.
Zipping, I think would work for setting any pins that would bind before the watchdog pin, just so long as you are tensioning the outer core (perhaps via sticking it to the inner core and tensioning that, or just by directly touching the outer core through touching around or through a pin or something). If the watchdog pin needs to _fall_ to be set, that means the zipped pins will have to fall too, thus leaving no time when the shear line can actually be accessed through a zipping attack, no matter how fast you try rotating the lock. Both slow zip and fast zip are thwarted here.
Do you think the hammer attack would fail due to bumping the watchdog pin (if it was to lower)? I'd guess no, but in any case, this particular attack can easily be countered by not allowing anything other than the top of the master pins to access the shear line. If you just make the master pins longer or decrease the amount of possible vertical movement, the master pins just wouldn't be able to be moved up that high.
For clarity about my solution to the hammer attack, let's say the difference between the lowest bitting of your key and the highest bitting of your key is x. You only really need to provide maybe slightly more than x vertical movement in the pin stack. Let's say you provide vertical space x+h over which your pin stack can move. When you push the key pins all the way up (as in, the pins are hitting the top and pressing into fully compressed springs), all the top-of-master-pin lines will be in a region of size x at h above your shear line. If your master pins are such that your smallest master pin is larger than h, then there is no way for the bottom of the master pins to be used at all. Only the line at the top of the master pins can be separated when opening the lock.
So basically, if you fix the spacing issue, there's not even any room for any shear line in the pin stack to be used other than the ones at the tops of the master pins. Since decoding via pin stack size is fixed too, that's two birds with one stone.
Could you draw a simple diagram of your ideas and post an imgur.com/ link to it ?
Looks like a shim could be inserted between the cores from the front on the lock. Not sure what that would achieve but I'd ensure there is no gap there to be safe
I absolutely love this lock design, it’s simplicity, it’s ease of manufacturability, it’s thought about pin compatibility. However, your design I think may have one issue, your lock body might not be compatible with some lock housings because of how beefy your lock body is. So you might not be able to install your lock on some standard housings like an Abus housing or some other standard housings. I’d be interested to see if you could design your lock to be more flexible in this regard.
Watchdog attack:
- Lift the watchdog pin by inserting a long tool and pushing it up, fixing it in place (glue or wedging)
- Attach core and midcore together (glue or wedging)
- With the separation of setting and testing thwarted, regular lockpicking may commence
super cool idea, and great execution
I’m no expert but I feel with all these smart parts in a lock, there are a lot that can go wrong. The tiny little disk pins could tip over and lock up. You mentioned in another video that machines are not precise and perfect, this also makes the lock more prone to jams in my eyes. You also mentioned that it’s impossible to get the pins over the sheer line, but there are tools that pass a wire thru them. The wire is insert further in so that it can push the pins above the line. I believe Sparks and Code made a tool like one I just mentioned.
While the disc pins /could/ turn, it's nor something you would expect for a few reasons, A. it's marketed as a door lock so the normative forces are limited, B. it's under load from the springs, C they're in a column,
All of which is too say even if they shift slightly they'll be pushed back, a worse? case is using a malformed key and them getting gummy in the lock turning, but again they'll naturally realign because they are in the __ form, they need a LOT of space to get to the I, or even /, and in that case they would still be prone to going flat again if jossled because the key pins are blocks N that can't be turned sideways.
All of this is assuming the wafers are thin enough that they can be turned at all. if it's I==I the thickness will stop turning like any of the larger pins.
a possible improvement is to put pins inside the springs - this can prevent over-lifting attacks , also against kinetic use different strengths of springs
if you design a good one and make the designs free or near free, you're gonna revolutionize the world
I just saw your "how to build" video in my recommendations, and would like to offer my thoughts. Your design is very similar to one I suggested on a lock picker's forum a few years ago, and I doubt I was the first to think of it. A critical flaw someone pointed out that I'm surprised you haven't yet run into is that unless the tolerances between the wafers and pin stacks are very tightly controlled, it's possible for wafers to get jammed in a mis-aligned state if there's ever any slack space between them. If that were to happen in a lock, it may be impossible to ever open it again without access to the tops of the pin stacks.
I've had some other ideas for variations of "sample then test" locks if you'd be interested, but I'm not sure how best to share them.
Here's an extra idea for you to think about. If percussion attacks work on joggling the pins until something lines up, how about adding some extra protection pins around the shear line that are actually held on weak springs and end just fractionally clear of the shear line say at 120 degree intervals around the circumference. Banging the lock, whilst you may line the tumblers up for a millisecond would likely also vibrate one of the protection pins into the shear line, jamming it in place for the same millisecond and thus defeating a percussion attack. Not sure if I have explained this very well, hopefully you get the idea.
I think there's a lot to be done by changing your unlocking mechanism and your key shape. See Swiss door locks, they're incredible. Maybe also just change the key shape to have some part of the key pushing a mechanism lateraly or horizontally to put all of the the vertical pins in a different position before being decoded. Basically, use all three dimensions instead of only one.
One idea that would more time consuming but still somewhat allows single pin picking is to set each pin stack to position 1,2, etc, rotate the lock and see if it falls into a deeper set. Since the movement on the core when setting a pin correctly is usually quite small, you would need something to actually measure this. Maybe simply putting a reference marking with a pencil on the core and body could be enough to see the difference though.
This would require a lot more skill than a traditional pick, is more time consuming, is probably even with a lot of skill still error-prone, and could probably be mitigated entirely by using spules and/or serrated pins. You would probably also need a specialized tool to keep multiple pin stacks in the correct position at once
I like that the design addresses the issues but is also practical to manufacture. Nice work
By the way in Europe thieves like to snap the lock. You should consider forceful rotation and core pulling attacks. I.e. reasonable levels of destructive defeats. Not valid for lock pickers but important for the real world.
Bro, you need wayy more subscribers! I hope I can buy your lock one day at the local walmart!
Are you worried about people stealing your design? Great videos by the way, you are concise and industrious, and your diagrams are top notch!
Andy Pugh has a similar lock design, for which he says he has applied for a patent. These BDD videos are munh more descriptive than anything I found about Andy Pugh.
awesome series, great presentation
Much appreciated
Fantastic video, more please
If you were up for precision engineering, you could make pins that act like rails with each other so that pins cannot separate vertically but can still slide when rotated
It is worth your time lol
I neeeeed to see this lock vs Lock Picking Lawyer
If you could design a lock that TLPL has a lot of trouble opening, then you sir would have the oportunity to rake in the big bucks 🤑
You could make a hollow cylinder that goes around the spring or a thin solid cylinder that goes within the spring so that the travel is limited but the preload is unchanged. Maybe
8:40 I wouldn't expected kinetic attack to be this effective! I guess that's just another reason to avoid any springs in mechanical lock design.
A vulnerability someone else pointed out is that the watchdog pin could be vulnerable to kinetic attacks so a combined method could be used, if someone connects the inner and outer cores they could knock it upwards then pick the other pins like normal furthermore I suspect the cammed surface might allow new kinetic attacks for the watchdog pin specifically, for example rotating the inner core breifly yet harshly to launch it up.
A way to fix this would be to add a more limiting mechanical linkage, for example imagine a piston engine, the inner core is the "crankshaft", a connecting rod links an off center spoke attached to the rest of the inner core to the "piston", or watchdog pin, so only once it's pulled fully into the "cylinder", or outer core by the inner core turning far enough will they both be able to rotate. The machining might be a pain but it shouldn't be too bad.
As a bonus since it's moving down instead of up and displacing a driver pin it wouldn't be possible to wedge the driver pin upwards somehow then turn the inner and outer core back into alignment, perhaps by an attacker adding friction between the inner and outer core so when turning it back the outer core continuously puts pressure in the reverse direction, keeping the driver from falling.
I think you greatly underestimated how vulnerable it'd be overlifting attacks, based on what you showed there you wouldn't need to lift the stacks completely beyond the outer core, just high enough that the wafer stacks overlap the shear between the outer core and the body instead of between the inner and outer core. You did talk about that later in kinetic attacks but the solution you gave seems limited and limiting. You could limit the potential travel distance of the pins without needing the user to compress the springs completely by having a narrower section that can fit the springs but not the pins.
For preventing decoding attacks why add additional master pins of variable length when you could just vary the length of the driver pins directly? Not a vulnerability, it just seems like an unessesary complication.
awesome video's fun and imformative but the problem with a unpickable lock is that if the lock is un pickable the window is still brickable or the wood door still crowbarable en the metal grindable, it's a good first defence but if people want to get in they will
This is one of the best series on locks I've seen on UA-cam. Thank you for your hard work! I would love to see this lock in production, and before that, purchase a prototype to play with. Any chance I could get one?
I have an idea for preventing impact attacks add a pin on the opposite side with an extension spring that will be easier to bind in the central core if force is applied. The thought being if the bump attack is performed that pin will engage and prevent the central core from turning beyond the lip of that security pin. So that pin would be like a spool pin, double mushroom pin, or a gin pin.( types of security pins used in locks currently. You could also theoretically let that be a gravity pin to keep costs down.
Love this R&D type stuff
Nice design. If one would find a way to independently tension the outer core, one could just pick most pins normally and the last pin by twisting the inner core. Since I don't see how that would be done, I would not call it packable, but that is at least something to keep in mind.
Step 1: Make a metal version, either DIY, that is get all the tools or find a makerspace or similar where you can do it or order it from somewhere that can do that sort of job.
Step 2: Test, check, doublecheck everything works and repeat from Step 1 until you succeed.
Step 3: Send it to the LPL :)
The walk back attack could be defeated by having a two section bolt.
I think you could prevent drilling attacks if you make a rotating plate at the very beginning, which would rotate freely with the borers and install some carbide pins in the lock itself. But I don't know if there are any disadvantages