99% Invisible - 160- Perfect Security

Episode Date: April 15, 2015

The pursuit of lock picking is as old as the lock, which is itself as old as civilization. But in the entire history of the world, there was only one brief moment, lasting about 70 years, where you could put … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. A man walks down a dark alley. He's dressed all in black. Black beanie hat, black gloves. He approaches a door, drops to one knee, and produces from his pocket a small metal tool. He inserts the tool into the keyhole. He deftly slides the tool around inside the keyhole until he's in. Security has been breached. But only in the movies, because prospective lock pickers take note, you generally can't do that with just a pick, or hairpin, or a paperclip. There are two tools you need to pick a lock. And one of them is usually left out.

When you see people picking locks in movies, this is the part they always forget. The tension wrench. This is a tension wrench. It's a L-shaped piece of metal with a little twist in it. An L-shaped piece of metal that, with one hand, you insert at the bottom of the keyhole, while the other hand uses the pick to work the pins in the lock. And hold the lock with a little bit of rotational tension. That, by the way, is Lee Honeywell, showing our producer Sam Greenspan how to pick a lock. Lee is a digital security expert and amateur lockpicking instructor. I taught a bunch of people how to pick locks at a feminist science fiction convention one year.

I'm at Lee at our office in San Francisco. We sat in a conference room among piles of tension wrenches and lock picks and special practice locks, built for the picking. You have to push each pin up far enough that you can't see that bottom part, see how you can see the bottom part there. There's two pieces of the pin, you have to get.

So when you pick a lock, you're using the pick and tension wrench to do the work of the key. You need them both. It's okay, so I'm kinda pretty good with pick into the keyhole. Oh, is that it? I did it. Yay!

Yay! The pursuit of lock picking is as old as the lock, which is itself as old as civilization. But in the entire history of the world, there was only one brief moment about 70 years, where you could put something under lock and key, a chest to save your home, and have complete, unwavering certainty that no intruder could get to it. A feeling that security experts call perfect security. And since we lost perfect security in the 1850s, it has remained elusive. Despite tremendous leaps forward in security technology,

we have never been able to get perfect security back. Locks go back at least as far as ancient Egypt. But in March, I'm dropping a big paper, theorizing that the Mesopotamians were actually the creators of the original lock and that the Egyptians then learned it from them. This is Skylar Town. I am Skylar Town and I am a security anthropologist,

research scholar with the Ronan Institute, but generally just an independent academic of all things related to locks. For the Middle Ages on, four hundreds of years, locks were not very good. If you were poor, you could have a terrible lock, and if you had some money, you could have a terrible lock with some added features that might, at best, confuse a trespasser. They're chest with false keyholes, they're padlocks even with false keyholes.

False keyholes, which they hoped would draw the thief away from the true keyhole. Some locks had false keyholes that even had lock-like components affixed to them, so it felt like they were attached to the latching mechanism, but actually weren't. Seriously, the best you could do was try to confuse an intruder into picking a fake lock. But as soon as the real keyhole was known, the security was pretty much nil. There was no perfect security, there was no lock that could keep everyone out. And then in the 1770s, an English guy named Joseph Brahma entered the locksmithing scene. And this is like a wizard from the future had come back in time and invented the most

amazing lock in the world. If the name Joseph Brahma sounds familiar to you fellow engineering history nerds, this is the same Joseph Brahma who invented the flush toilet and the first water pumping fire engine and a Numatic tree murdering machine that it would literally just rip a full-ground tree out of the ground by its roots That one wasn't as popular, but it was pretty cool and so Joseph Brahma inventor time wizard tree murderer He was really interested in locks. He made something called, aptly, the Brahma safety lock.

Brahma disconnected the key from the both. So what the key is doing is it's rotating and inner chamber of this lock. Take my word for it, explaining how this thing works does not make for compelling radio. But the main thing about this lock is that it added levels of complexity in between the key and the bolt.

It's like a whole roob Goldberg scenario plays out inside the lock. The key touches one thing, which moves another thing and triggers it. And Brahma was so confident in his lock that he actually published a pamphlet detailing exactly how it worked. No more hiding the keyhole or shrouding the locks operation in secrecy. Brahma revealed everything about the lock and still claimed that it could not be opened

without the key. And he also had another idea that would revolutionize locksmithing. He also contributes the idea of turning this whole thing into a contest, showmanship. So as soon as he has a padlock version of this lock that he is very confident in, he puts it in the window of his stored Picadilly and he paints on it a message a challenge in gold lettering quote

The artist who can make an instrument that will pick or open this lock shall receive 200 guineas the moment it is produced 200 guineas in 1777 is something north of 20,000 British pounds today. And people try, people actually take a real honest shot at this, but no one, not even with their own tools, could hack it. And it remained in that window for 70 plus years, challenging all comers and everybody failed to open it. Brahms knew unbeatable lock and the hoopla surrounding it caught the attention of the British crown and they wanted to up the game.

They wanted a lock that wouldn't just be unbreakable but would also alert the owner if someone tried to get into it. The government sponsored a contest with 100 British pounds as reward. The best one at the time was Jeremiah Chubb's detector lock. And the way that this worked is that when you lifted one of the tumblers up too high, it would actually trip a latching mechanism that would hold that tumbler up in the air too high and it wouldn't drop back down again.

And when that happened, the lock would completely freeze up, even the key would open it. Until you put a different key and rotate it in the opposite direction and reset all of the tumblers. And so if you went to unlock a chest or a vault or your front door and the key to your chub detector lock didn't work, you would know that someone had tried to get into it and that they had failed. Advertisements for the detector lock ran in the Bleak House cereals, which read, quote, my name is Chubb, that makes the patent locks. Look upon my works, ye burclers, in despair. And as these newer and better locks were getting invented, the public spectacle around them rose to a fever pitch.

At one point, they offered a guy in prison parole if he could break the chop lock. And this guy was a housebreaker. He had opened many locks in his life, and he tried it and tried it and tried it and literally his potential freedom was genuinely on the line. And he had to turn the thing back in and say, you couldn't do it and he couldn't imagine

that anyone could do it. And going forward, the names Brahma and Shub are basically interchangeable for perfect security. But only until the great lock controversy of 1851. In 1851, an American named AC Hobbs traveled to London for the Great Exhibition, the first international exhibition of manufactured products. Back in the States, Hobbs had made a name for himself as a sort of white hat security consultant. He'd go visit banks and say, hey, if I can break the lock on your safe, you want to buy one of mine, the banks would be like, yeah, sure, give it a shot. And he was selling locks like

crazy. Hobbs was a natural. And naturally, on day one of the exhibition, he publicly announced that he would pick the Chubb detector lock. The one that seizes up if you pick it incorrectly. Hobbs successfully picked the Chubb detector lock in front of a crowd. But the inventor, Jeremiah Chubb, wasn't convinced. He wanted to see Hobbs do it again. So another trial was set, this time in front of auditors and reporters.

And AC Hobbs opened the lock again. Take that Chubb. He actually opened the lock pretty quickly. A witness wrote that it took Hobbs about 25 minutes, and the way Hobbs did it was to actually use the lock against itself. He would pick it until he tripped the detector mechanism, causing the lock to seize up. That would give Hobbs information about what was going on inside, and then he would pick the lock in the opposite direction to reset the detector.

He'd go back and forth firing and resetting the detector until the lock told him everything he needed to know about how to get it open. And then he closed it again and then he opened it again. This time in seven minutes. He had complete control over the chub lock. It has absolutely been opened. But the chub detector lock was really just a warm-up. The main event was the Brahma safety lock, the one with the challenge painted on it in gold lettering, which had been sitting in

Joseph Brahma's storefront window for 70 years, unbeaten, taunting lock pickers everywhere. AC Hobbs threw down the gauntlet. So a trial was conducted against the Brahma lock, they give him 30 days to conduct himself against it. Joseph Brahma had died by this point, and his sons were running his shop. They gave Hobbes a room above his store, and Hobbes got to work. He was allowed to set the lock up in a way

that was easy to work on, and he could use all his own tools. Monitors would come check in on him periodically. He winds up bringing on this thing for about 52 hours over the course of 14 days and finally gets it open and the way that he gets it open is much more like sort of brute forcing it. He kind of designed a method of building a key for it It wasn't super elegant. It couldn't be really easily repeated against a brand new one and some of his methods could have been prevented with some slight alterations But still the Prama lock had been opened. When Hobbes opened that lock, I swear to you the world changed.

Overnight, the feeling of perfect security had evaporated, and we have never gotten it back. Locksmiths weren't able to convince the public that perfect security could be restored, but they did keep inventing new locks. One such locksmith was Linus Yale Jr. You've probably seen present day locks with the name Yale on them, that's because Yale's company was able to mass produce their locks in a scale that no one ever had. Their lock became the most common in the world. Yale's design, patented in 1851, the same year as the Great Lock

Controversy, was called the Pin and Tumblr Lock. It's the kind of lock you see everywhere. If you live in an apartment building, this is almost certainly the same style of lock as you have on your front door of your apartment building. It's the kind of lock that Lee Honeywell taught me how to pick. This is a design that's been really commercially successful because it's super cheap to make,

and works pretty well. The pin tumbler locks we have today are not too different from the pin tumbler locks manufactured a century ago. And the common pin tumbler lock is nowhere near as secure as the beast that was the Brahma Safety Lock, which took one of the greatest minds in locksmithing more than 50 hours to defeat. With about two hours of instruction and some practice, anyone even you can pick a simple door lock in a few minutes, and if you're feeling confident in your abilities, you can square off against other lockfickers.

And that's our man Skyler Town competing there at a match in New York City. He's also competed in arguably the World Cup of Locksport the Dutch Open. Competitive Locksport these days isn't so much about whether the locks can be beaten. The more about how fast you can beat them. And the locks used for competitions are often a lot more complicated than your average door lock. The lock on your door is so easily subverted. Just casually subverted, really, on most people's doors. With some skill in patience with attention wrench and lock pick set, you can get into almost anyone's house. But you don't even need that much.

Just a few seconds with a crowbar or a brick through a window will do the job nicely. Our homes are incredibly porous. The locks in place now at banks and other high security venues are light years beyond what they had in the 1800s. But the average consumer grade locks didn't evolve nearly as much. It's not that we don't need locks, we do. We just don't need them to be impenetrable. What we're actually trusting is not the lock, what we're trusting is our community.

We're trusting this sort of social order. And what the lock is now, the lock is a social construct as much as it is a mechanical construct. And so in a post-perfect security world, most of the locks that we interact with every day don't inspire us to trust them, they inspire us to trust each other. And that's why a $15 lock from your local hardware store will probably suffice. 99% invisible was produced this week by Sam Greenspan, the Katie Mingle, Avery Troubleman and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW San Francisco and produced at the offices of Arxite in architecture

and interiors firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. We're all on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and Spotify, but you can unpick the lock that is 99% invisible at 99pi.org. Radio to PO. From PRX. you