DIY Lock Pick Set

Here's another very interesting post on lock-picking, like making a padlock shim out of soda can: How to make your own lock-picking tools from a windshield wiper. Of course, the skills that come with it, plus the ethics of when it's acceptable to use it, are just as important (if not more).

After you've picked that up, try a copy of Practical Lock Picking: A Physical Penetration Tester's Training Guide or The Complete Book of Locks and Locksmithing.

How to Shim Open a Padlock On the Cheap

This is a quick, cheap, and simple way to crack open a padlock with a homemade shim from a soda can. Not a new idea, but a well-described set of instructions.

When Professor Matt Blaze published "Safecracking for the Computer Scientist", he received all sorts of negative feedback. There were things in his paper that were known vulnerabilities to all locksmiths for perhaps as long as a century, yet they were not fixed in future designs of locks. Publishing this info does not harm the public, since criminals already know how to do this. But publishing allows consumers of these lock products to be wiser. Master lock (depicted at right) has certainly known about this vulnerability for decades. It's been floating around the internet at least since the dot-com boom days.