Hacker automates lock picking with Arduino system

A hacker has designed a device made up of 3D-printed parts and an Arduino system. The whole can open Master brand combination locks within 30 seconds. He has released the draft.

Hacker Sammy Kamkar has named his device Combo Breaker. The system consists of an Arduino Nano, stepper motor, driver for the stepper motor of Allegro and HKT22 optical rotary encoder. Further parts come from the 3d printer and Kamkar has released the designs.

The system runs the Combo Breaker software, the source code of which has been released. The operation of the system is based on a weakness found in Master combination locks. This allowed the 64,000 possible combinations of the locks to be reduced to 100 initially, but Kamkar managed to reduce this to a maximum of 8 steps.

In total, the parts of the Combo Breaker cost less than 100 dollars. The system can be used mobile thanks to the presence of a battery. By default, it would take 5 minutes to crack the Master locks, but if manually set the first digit, which would be easy to find, the Breaker will do it in 30 seconds.