splinter cell!

Time to begin pressing all of the buttons at least once after unlocking my panic room.

ok, now for someone to present diy handheld thermal imaging device

What material are these buttons made of? I’m guessing metal; otherwise the heat wouldn’t transfer into them after such a quick press. And metal makes a more impressive looking safe. Make them out of polystyrene and they won’t get warm so quickly (and they’ll last maybe ten presses … oh well).

This looks like the lock they used:
http://www.lagard.com/pages/index.asp?action=show_product&id=7

A similar attack I noticed… a certain apartment building had a keypad with 3 very dirty digits; the rest were spotless.

SO if i understand this correctly, i could foil a thermal imaging device merely by running my finger over all of the keys after i entered the code. easy.

That was NOT a do it yourself thermal imager made from a digital camera. It was a do it yourself NIR infrared camera. Two vastly different technologies. And that was NOT a thermal device built from scavanged parts it is a light multiplier or intensifier it is NOT sensitive in the thermal range. Thermal sensors are very hard to build, and uncooled thermal sensors even harder.

Using a pen or pencil or something of that nature would insulate your fingers from the keypad and might be enough to stop this hack. I have thought about this hack before but never bothered attempting to show it in action.

Disclaimer – Employee of FLIR

that is a low resolution camera. even if you dont need it you can get higher resolution cameras for around 12k from mikron infrared.

oolldd, i’ve been doing this in splinter cell for years! haha…

I’d like a DIY hack more.

#9: Simple, put a time-stamped normal-vision camera with it in the same box.
#16: Spiffy.
The potential of this is scary, and at the same time… astounding.

“What material are these buttons made of? I’m guessing metal; otherwise the heat wouldn’t transfer into them after such a quick press. And metal makes a more impressive looking safe. Make them out of polystyrene and they won’t get warm so quickly (and they’ll last maybe ten presses … oh well).”

this wont matter too much. we use these in firefighting and because of that I’ve had a lot of time to play with them (our dept has 2). putting your hand on grass in the sun will leave a hamdprint for minutes, the top of a polyustyrene cooler will last even longer, hell even pavement will keep the image for several minutes. if anything metal keys might give off the heat faster than insulators like polystyrene.

also cars are very cool to look at with one of these should you ever get the chance. you can only see the upper half of a person (windows if thet’re down) but you can see the engine glowing nicely and the tires + where they were on the pavement. another cool thing is looking at people through windows, they’re completely invisible and mirrors reflect the users thermal images :D

cg: Very good points, employee or no. ;) I was sort of shooting from the hip, and forgot to account for those solutions using the wrong part of the IR spectrum. I guess we’ll have to shell out and get one of your $5k imagers, but in this case you get what you pay for!

A much easier way to get the numbers (but not the sequence) is to spray the keys with some UV reflecting dust or aerosol. After the keys has been used, just use a UV flashlight to check where the UV dust has been smeared.

Maybe it would be possible to use a different pattern of UV “grease” on each key and then work out the sequence from that. The first key would only be smeared, the second would be smeared _and_ it would have residues from the pattern of the first key and so on…

I had a chance to play with one of the units used by firefighters and it was shocking how sensitive it was. Just touching a wood table for a second would leave a spot visible for a minute or so.

use a pen or something to push the buttons next time we open a safe…

Whenever I am using a keypad I do two things:

1. I rest my first three fingers on the whole row of numbers, only using enough pressure to register the one number I need. You would need a camera with a /very/ high resolution to detect the minute movement.

2. As my PIN is four digits, I press one key at random, then hit ‘correction’ with my thumb while moving my fingers to the row for the correct first number, thus entering four digits with six beeps.

Thnik about it!
Deadly_Dad