Locked out

OPENING a suspect suitcase to search its contents usually means breaking the lock. So America's Transportation Security Administration worked with manufacturers to create a special category of locks, which can be opened by master keys held by airport security.That might seem an elegant solution'but illustrations in a Washington Post story about the TSA last year included high-definition photos of a complete set of the keys. Commonly available software can turn any picture of an object into a digital blueprint. Now a group of amateur lock-pickers has proudly posted on the internet proof that they had used 3D printers to make perfect copies of the master keys, and published the files so that others could do the same.From a technological point of view this is nothing special: the dangers of publishing pictures of keys are well known. But the scale of the compromise is startling: around 300m locks have been sold with the TSA's red-triangle imprimatur, both as stand-alone padlocks and in luggage brands such as Samsonite.The damage to security is probably slight. Luggage locks are notoriously flimsy: they...Continue reading
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