Smart locks on doors using Bluetooth are designed to make it possible to access houses or containers without normal keys.
The trouble is, many of them turn out to be stupid. They can be defeated by old-fashioned thieves’ tricks, as amateur lock picker Ray recently demonstrated at the Chaos Communication Congress in Germany.
Ray showed how the smart locks, which are usually opened by an app, can be picked either mechanically or electronically.
This rusty, cobwebbed door may be more secure than many Bluetooth locks, a hacker has proved. (File photo credit: “Stefan Sauer / dpa”.)
In one of his hacks, a small piece of sheet metal was used to open the lock, while another model was picked with the help of a magnet.
A third case saw the tinkerers decode the communication between the app, lock and online platform.
Ray belongs to a German group, Sportsfreunden der Sperrtechnik, which just for fun figures out ways to crack locking technology.
In August 2016, security experts at the Defcon 24 conference tested 16 smart locks and 12 of them were picked without much effort at all.
-dpa
