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Not only that it works for extremely simple tumbler locks. This is a very cool PoC but nothing that a couple hours of picking and the right tools won’t get you. Specifically a decoder will get you the bitting to make your own key.



A couple hours of standing at the actual door, picking is not comparable to surreptitiously snapping a few seconds of audio and doing all the work elsewhere, then showing up with four or five possible keys, one of which works.


That’s fair enough if the concept worked in the real world. When I looked over the Singapore data on this, I saw locks used were filing cabinet grade or slightly better. I look forward to seeing this working on a modern tumbler with spool pins and outside the lab, I’ll be really impressed.


Spool pins have a cutaway midsection that seizes up if the lock is being picked: i.e. someone is applying rotational pressure while trying to move the pins. That doesn't seem relevant relevant to the audio technique which just records the clicks from a correct key. In that situation, the spool pins move more or less just like flat pins. While there are outside-of-lab challenges with real door locks, that's probably not one of them.




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