So, this is a talk about locksport competitions.
We're going to talk about how you compete, what the competitions are like, how you get good, all those kinds of fun things.
So, here's our quick agenda.
A little bit about who I am, who this guy next to me is.
We'll talk about what locksport actually is, the different types of competitions, and where we go to do these things.
So, me, I'm Matt Burrow.
I am a red team manager by day, on the weekends, and at night.
I am also a co-organizer for Seattle Locksport.
So, shout out to all the Seattle people in the front.
If you're in the Seattle area ever, feel free to come by.
We meet a couple times a month, have a lot of fun, teach you how to pick locks.
It's great.
I've also written a couple of books.
The most important one here is Locksport.
Came out this year.
There I am on the cover.
I have a co -author here with me, as well, for Locksport.
If you want to, come by the No Starch Press vendor booth at 2.30 today.
We will be signing copies of the book.
And I've competed in locksport competitions around the world since about 2016.
With me here, I have Jos Valles.
Good day.
I'm Jos Valles.
Like it says on the screen, I do security stuff as a day job.
I used to be the president for tool.nl.
That's the original tool, by the way.
And, well, I wrote the book.
Yada, yada, yada.
And I've been into locksport for quite some while now.
In 2006, was my first dabble in competing.
And three years after that, I decided to start winning.
And, yeah, that's basically what happened.
So, yeah, I mean, that's it.
Take this one?
Yeah, there you go.
Cool.
So what is Locksport?
Notice the sport in particular.
Definition of Locksport.
It is non-destructive opening of locks in a manner that the manufacturer never intended.
And we do this as a hobby and as a competition to see who can do it the fastest.
And notice we didn't say lock picking, but opening of locks.
That's an important distinction, and you'll see why in a minute.
So why do we do this, right?
What makes us tick?
Why do we go travel around the world to do these things?
You know, any of us, I think, who are into locksport for any amount of time see locks as a fun puzzle.
It's a challenge.
It's something you want to defeat.
Just like hacking digitally, it's analog hacking, right?
It's a fun thing to do.
We also do it because we want to improve on our own skills.
We want to show that we're the best.
We want to set a personal best for ourselves.
Maybe we want to brag to our friends or maybe mock them a little bit.
So always good to show off to your friends and enemies.
You could maybe get famous from this.
Maybe not super famous, but you've probably all heard of LPL, very famous locksporter.
There's several people who are well known in the locksport community, and even beyond that, that regular normal non-DEF CON people have heard of.
So you could maybe get famous.
And then there are prizes.
What kinds of prizes?
Well, locks often.
You can win trophies.
You can win lock picking gear, all kinds of fun things.
Here we are winning at various things or at least placing.
So it's fun to get recognized for doing something well.
So yeah, come compete, you can win things.
All right, brief history of locksport, how it got started.
Locksmiths have been picking locks and opening locks without keys forever.
That's kind of their job.
Starting in the 60s, there was the Model Railroad Club at MIT.
They started kind of getting into places, wanting to pick locks, so that a lot of it kind of spun out from there.
Then in Europe, locksport really started taking off in the late 90s.
SSDev in Germany was founded by people from the Chaos Computing Club.
They met with people from Hope, and so then it kind of came to the US.
In the Netherlands, we had the Dutch NVHS, which was the Dutch Association for Hinges and Locksport, which is also kind of a funny joke if you know Dutch.
That then spun off into becoming TOOL, the original TOOL, TOOL-NL in 2002.
And then from there, they had their first LockCon that year, which is, we'll talk about a very big competition and gathering of lock picking and various lock opening things in the Netherlands.
It's awesome.
And then eventually that trickled down into the US, and TOOL-US was started around 2006 at Hope, and then DefCon that year.
So that's the very brief history of locksport.
It's been going on now for 20, 30 years as a major sport.
I mentioned that lock picking is not the only thing.
There are various kinds of competitions that we have at all these big events.
We'll talk about the different kinds of competitions, what they're like, and then we'll talk about where you can go and do these things.
Of course, lock picking is the biggest event at all these various conferences, because that's what people think of when they think of locksport.
It is the primary competition, but certainly not the only one.
If you don't know about lock picking, walk through that curtain.
You will be taught lock picking in five minutes.
You'll open locks.
It will be fun.
If you know a bit about lock picking, what is it actually like to compete and do these things?
We all gather at a conference.
There are usually big round tables, often with like five to ten people sitting at these tables.
Everyone gets a lock.
You usually get about five minutes per lock to try to pick that lock.
You record your time if you open it, or did not open if you don't.
After the five minutes, they say switch.
You hand it to the person on your left or the person on your right.
All the locks move around the table.
You see how quickly you can open or how many locks you can open.
The person at the table with the most opens moves on to the final round, or if there's a tie, the person with the best cumulative time.
And then there's a final round table.
Same story.
Pass the locks around.
Usually harder locks in that round, and then you get your top three people.
That's most lock picking competitions.
So what does that look like?
Here's me opening a lock at LockCon.
Here's other people opening locks at LockFest, which is another great event.
So yeah, sit at a table, you know, have a drink, pick locks, record your time.
Lots of fun.
Then there's Impressioning.
We have the world expert in Impressioning, so I'll hand off to him.
Again, hello.
Like Maat said, there are several competitions that are run around the world.
One of them is Impressioning.
What is Impressioning?
Well, Impressioning is opening locks, otherwise it wouldn't be part of Locksport.
What Impressioning is, is the art of making a key without knowing what the key exactly looks like.
So we're creating a key from scratch.
How do we do that?
We work from an uncut blank key, so like the keys hanging at your key duplication site.
You take a blank key, you put that in the lock.
It has to fit, so it has to be the correct type and brand of key.
And you start wiggling that key.
You put some force on it and your lock will leave some marks on the key where the depth of the key is not correct yet.
So if you take out that key and you look at it quite closely, probably with some lights and some magnifying aids, then you figure out where the key is not correct yet.
And then you file off just a little bit of material of that part.
And then you rinse and repeat.
Insert the key again, start wiggling, look at it, and then you keep on doing that.
And in the end, you'll open.
You need a bit of gear for that.
This happens to be part of my gear.
And it works basically the same as Matt said, how the normal picking works, except that everybody starts at the same time.
So a competition might be, I don't know, 30 people in one room.
Everybody gets the same lock.
So the lock, same brand, but they're also keyed alike.
We have no idea what the key is, but they're keyed alike.
Because if the cut would be shallow in, for me, and Matt would be handed a deeper lock, then he has to put in more work.
Because you have to recycle through this process over and over and over again.
And also filing more.
So to keep it a level playing field, everybody has the same lock.
And then it's 3, 2, 1, go, and people start start abusing their locks to get them open.
A competition, a normal competition, first round takes about an hour.
And the first, maybe six, depending on where you are, the first six to open go in, progress to the final round, which means they get six different locks and they open them.
And then you do that in a roundabout way, same as with the picking.
So everybody, all the finalists open, they're all six locks.
And then we figure out who opened the most, that person will win.
And if that's a tie, then we're looking at times.
And looking at times, of looking at marks, what are we actually looking for?
Well, so we're filing those keys.
We normally use round files for it, but that's all technical.
So your key will look weirdish if you look at the shape of the cuts, because those are round.
But that's also, for me, that's a good thing, because that means that the bottom of that cut will be smooth instead of a sharp valley.
And then you can actually way easier hunt for marks there.
And you can see at the bottom of those two pictures, you can see quite distinct marks in this case.
They're not always that clear, but well, for pictures, this is good.
So yeah, it's a hand file.
And like I said, first round is about an hour, and mostly about a half of the field will open within that a lot of time.
Some people will be a bit faster.
That's a lot.
Order of magnitude or so faster, maybe.
Yeah, and then what other kinds of competitions?
So there's also safe manipulation, safe cracking, if you will.
But here we don't have the entire safe shipping big metal boxes to competitions would be painful and expensive.
So we just have the actual safe lock mounted on a piece of plastic.
The idea here is to figure out how to open the safe dial in the fastest time, just like everything else.
How you actually open a safe dial, it's a bit different than lock picking, than impressioning, a completely different mechanism, right?
And so the attack is different.
Instead of straight feel like you would with lock picking, you're actually using sight and feel combined.
And then you're doing a little bit of math homework, which is always fun in a competition.
You're building very nice graphs to show how you open the lock.
In competition, there's usually about three locks that are very commonly used.
I'd say the S&G 6730 is by far the most common.
So if you want to start practicing this hobby, go on eBay and buy yourself one of those.
They're usually about $50.
There's also the Legarde 3300.
That one is a little bit trickier.
But if you want to practice a couple things, that's a good one to try.
And then finally, the Big Red is just kind of the prettiest lock you can buy.
Look, it's got nice red wheels.
So what are we feeling for when we're actually manipulating this lock?
You're dialing a number, and then you're going back.
And if you know anything about how you open an actual safe, if you know the combination, you would dial, you know, the wheel, three different numbers, and then you go back to center, back to zero, and you rotate it, and this nose will drop in.
I don't think that's me.
And we'll drop in and retract the bolt here.
You can see the nose has dropped into that brass circle there.
If it's not going to drop in, you'll see it rides along that brass circle, but then it actually collides with it on both sides.
And where it collides is usually somewhere around 95 and 5.
And so if you try a number, and then you try 95 and 5, try a different number, feel where those points are hitting, the closer you get to the correct code, the numbers will actually start to converge, because that nose is actually going a little bit lower into that brass wheel.
And so instead of 95 and 5, eventually you might get 96 and 4.
And that's when you know, okay, I found the correct number for one of those three digits.
So you graph that, you build this graph out, you find that point, and then there's some tests you can do to figure out if it's the first, second, or third number, and then you start dialing the second number or third number until you get it open.
There are some aids you can bring as well, like this sticker that you see on top of this safe dial you stuck on here.
This gives you very fine gradients, because it isn't always quite as clear as 95 to 94.
Sometimes it's 95 to 94.5.
And so this extra lines will help you find that exact number.
So it's a time consuming process, but some people get very fast at it, and can open locks in, you know, 20 minutes, maybe.
In a regular competition with non-professionals spinning the wheels, it's, you know, two hours is probably a good time.
Usually these competitions run during a larger event, so you have all day with the lock that you're playing with it while other people are giving talks, or other people competing in other things, you can keep working on it.
So that's typically how safe manipulation works at these events.
And then finally, another type of competition we see a lot of is lever lock picking.
This is particularly common in Europe, where you have the kind of older lever style locks, like you see a lot in England.
Completely different tools, a little bit different skill set, but you're still basically just picking a lock.
Same ideas.
These locks are also a little bit bigger, a little bit heavier, so we're not passing them around.
It's more kind of like the impressioning thing where you're sitting at one lock for a while, and you see how fast you get it while other people try the same lock.
Tools are often provided for you for these, because the tools are very specialized for the manufacturer of locks.
So most people aren't carrying around 50 different brands of tools for 50 different kinds of locks, so whoever is providing the locks for the competition often also provides the tools, which is a nice perk.
We also have a bunch of crazy events, and I think there's actually one going on next door, like right now, a dozer drill.
But people of course get creative at different hacker cons, they want to try new things, and so you can find all kinds of different events.
A dozer drill is kind of like what you see a photo of here on the screen.
This is kind of a simulation of a prison escape, right?
You've been locked up, you need to get yourself out of handcuffs, and then you need to get yourself out of a jail cell, and then you need to get into a file cabinet to steal your police record, and then you need to get into a police car and steal it and drive away.
So there are all kinds of different locks on the table to simulate that kind of escape.
And then there's also different kinds of things like forensic challenges.
Can you pick a lock without leaving marks in it, or can you identify the marks that were left in it, or can you tell what kind of pins are actually in this lock by feel?
Is that a spool?
Is it serrated?
Those kinds of things.
There's freestyle events, which is like go crazy, bring whatever tool you want, open the lock however you want, see how it goes.
As long as it's non-destructive.
Yeah, yeah, you can't cut the lock in half, but yeah.
And then key duplication based on a photo rather than having the lock to try, kind of like impressioning, different kinds of boxes of locks, time blocks.
You see things like under door tool things as well, trying to get into buildings bypassing the lock entirely.
Or picktactoe is something that the Foxconn, Foxpick people put together to pick locks and try to get the fastest, you know, to get three in a row.
So all kinds of really fun, creative things.
We like coming up with different kinds of competitions to always keep it fresh and interesting.
So that brings us to where do you compete?
We've talked about all different kinds of things.
Okay, so we've gotten you excited about this.
Hopefully you want to come give it a try.
Where can you go to do this other than, you know, in DEF CON in the lockpick village?
Well, probably the biggest and best event we'll start with first, and that's you Yeah.
Hello.
Like Matt said, you can compete well, basically all over the world.
But the one you really want to compete in and win is LockCon.
So that's considered to be the well, the Wimbledon of the lockpick world.
It's one of the oldest competitions there.
It's in the Netherlands.
They do the Dutch Open.
It's quite small.
It's about 100 people.
But those tend to be from all around the world.
So it's brilliant.
It's mostly normally it's in October-ish.
It takes about three days.
So a long weekend.
Last couple of times it was in a hotel.
And so it's all catered, all done.
And you'll be spending time with a lot of people and a lot of locks during that time.
There will always be just a regular picking games.
Impressioning also, definitely.
Most of the time lever locks will do safe manipulation.
Last year we had a car entry.
There's just a lot, a lot, a lot of talks and they keep on going on and on.
It's really, really brilliant.
It's fun times to be there.
So yeah, this is the same.
I mean, competitions, like I said, and also a lot of talks.
The picture on the right, that's actually a person that broke out of jail in a South African imprisonment.
And yeah, he taught himself how to pick locks and to make tools to pick locks.
And that was fun because normally when he gets invited to talk about this stuff, they talk about how it was to be in prison, this and that.
And this was the first time he could speak to a couple of geeks who were geeking out about how he made lockpicks.
So that was a very, very fun experience.
That's actually one of the very few talks that has been ever recorded at LockOn because normally it's a non-cabaret event, at least non-publicity.
And you tend to only can get in if you know people.
So it's because, well, it's not that a lot of what happens there is a secret, but a lot of our tours are quite expensive and we just leave our toys out at night.
And yeah, but because it's a friendly group and it's a close-knit known group, you can actually do that.
But it's a very, very, very fun event.
Lockfest.
And what are we going to do, lock up our toys?
Yeah, it's locks, right?
Yeah, I know.
And Tim was great.
You know, you get some really, really good talks.
I enjoy that part of it every year.
You know, I think he even had a movie made about him, right?
Daniel Radcliffe played him in the movies.
Yeah, very cool stuff.
Cool.
So if that's maybe a little too far for your first lockpicking competition, you can look a little bit closer to the U.S.
if you're from here.
We have Lockfest almost every year.
Hopefully we'll have it again next year.
There was a pause for COVID.
It's been in Seattle a number of years.
I don't know where the next one will be, but hopefully soon.
Go tell tool people you want to have Lockfest back, make it happen.
It's usually, again, a weekend-long event.
There's lockpicking, there's safe opening.
Here you can see the timed competition that I built with a couple of folks and people compete on to see how quickly they can get locks open.
Again, a lot of good talks, pretty small conference again.
The lock community is a pretty tight-knit group.
So maybe about 60, 80 people will show up for this.
Just have a really good time, have some good talks.
If you're a little bit more in the Midwest, there's always Locktoberfest in October.
It is held by Tool Chicago.
Seems like a really good event.
I have not been there, but I always see photos and it looks super fun.
So maybe one day I'll make it out there when I can spare the time.
But they have grilling, you can get some beer and some brats and go pick locks.
So, you know, proper Locktoberfest.
And here's a photo of some people winning some locks and other various picks and cool things from their conference from a couple of years ago.
But if you're really into spending your AMLs, head out to Australia.
Actually, well, this happened three times now, I think.
In Melbourne, there is All Second.
That's... it's the same as the other events, but it's Australia, so it has a completely different feel to it.
Also, a lot of talks, very interested.
Speakers flown in from, well, basically all around the world.
But the people there, so the attendants are mainly Australians.
And it's fun.
It's brilliant.
And of course, for us international lockpickers, if you go there, they have different locks.
And it's... those locks are different beasts, and they need to be attacked in different ways.
So that's very fun.
That's normally in June.
And well, they have workshops locked and everything.
So we did have picking there, master keying, we actually did have an impressioning event at one point.
And they're also quite big on tamper evidence.
So yeah, that's a very, very, very fun event.
Toby, the head organizer, did take a break because of work and life and all the stuff.
It'll probably happen again, but probably not this year.
Well, definitely not this year.
And probably not next year as well.
But it's still in the books.
At some point that will happen.
You see, well, a box of weird keys that they do have there.
And some keys are giving a lecture about impressioning.
Yeah, and then in Europe, well, like I said, there's lock-on in the Netherlands.
The Germans do every now and then also have hand impressioning competitions.
And on a separate day, they'll do the lock picking.
And the Czech guys at the moment are also doing that.
Smaller-ish group, so 90 people.
It's rather close to Prague.
And well, they do that for quite a couple of years now.
And as you can see, they have a couple of sponsors, which is not always the case within the lock-picking community, at least for an event.
Normally, the prizes get sponsored and stuff like that, but that's about it-ish.
Is this yours?
And where else?
There's always a few smaller conferences or conferences that are bigger, but where there's a smaller lock-picking portion to it, of course, Defcon right through there.
It's pretty big here, yeah.
There's Hope in New York.
There's ShmooCon in D.C.
at least one more year.
CCC, EMF, all the various Dutch hacker cons that change their name annoyingly every year.
All the various B-sides often have lock-picking events that you can go participate in.
And then Hacker Hotel, again, the Netherlands.
Other than that, there's also locksmithing and safe technician conferences.
These tend to be a little bit more invite-only.
You probably need to be part of a locksmithing association.
Some of those are easier or harder to join, but you can go and do safe cracking and hear a lot of talks about that if that's your thing.
And they have cool prizes like gold-plated locks when you win sponsors.
So that is it.
That is all the different kinds of competitions.
Those are the different ways you can compete.
We wanted to thank a few people.
Our co-authors, there were five of us that wrote the book.
Three of us are not here, so Walter, Nigel, and Banditos.
Really appreciate the sections of the book that they wrote.
It was great.
I want to thank specifically Peter South, who was our technical reviewer and who's also here in the front row and has helped out with Tool and Seattle Locksport and co-runs Seattle Locksport with me.
Super great guy.
Lucky Duck, thanks for being here.
You're awesome and my favorite.
Thanks to random person from the internet for the background photo that was creative comments.
And then also thanks to Tool US for letting us come here and speak and to DEF CON for letting us speak.
Finally, if you want to get in touch, here are all the things.
You can go to links and find me or us.
But more importantly, we will be here at the book signing at the No-Starch booth at 2.30 today.
So if you do not have a copy of our book and you would like one and you wanted to have at least two author signatures and a tech reviewer signature, 2.30, just there.
Vendor area east.
We will be sitting there and signing things.
So come say hi, come get books signed.
Thank you so much.
One more thing, hot from the press.
As of last week, this book also exists in a braille format.
Very cool.
Yeah, very cool.
That is currently only in Europe because it has been transcribed there to make that happen.
But as I understood, I am completely new to this format and this world.
I do have a couple of blind friends, but of course, I don't do braille.
And apparently the way it works, if it does exist in Europe, then it automagically will, at some point, will become available in American braille libraries as well.
So we think it's awesome.
Very cool.
Thank you, DEF CON.