I stayed up too late last night reading the oft-mentioned-of-late safecracking for the computer scientist (PDF format) (via Crypotgram), which was interesting.

I’ve always been fascinated (at a distance) by locks and safes, particularly after reading Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman!, which includes Richard Feynman’s experiences of amateur safe-cracking when working on the Manhattan project. I always wanted to learn safe-cracking and lock-picking, but general apathy stopped me from actually trying it out (a good thing, probably).

Although it has pissed off the locksmith community, in the same way revealing computer security flaws can get software vendors’ hackles up, all it is doing is keeping people informed; in this case, most off-the-shelf safe locks aren’t really any good. I doubt it’s going to turn anyone into a safecracker (although I expect some lone idiot will think he will be an expert after reading it and get caught in the act).

Even if you don’t want to read through pages of details of fences and gates and locking wheels, it’s still worth a flick through, to see the similarities and differences between physical and computer security, especially seeing how often the fallibility of humans is the easiest way of exploiting them. It is nicely revealing to see how a computer scientist would approach another realm’s problems - some other papers for other fields could also be interesting.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 17th, 2005 at 20:38:56 and is filed under General.