 We are the open organization of lock pickers. We're going to be teaching the introduction to lock picking class. We're starting a little late. So I skipped over some of the introductory material. We're going to start you right with the meat. This is going to be about a 25 minute class, which will give you the theory of how locks work, the theory of how lock picking works, and then some practical tips on how to make those lock picks you're holding in your hands actually open the lock in a practical fashion rather than a theoretical fashion. I'm going to try to answer all of your questions as I go. I'm hoping to preempt most of them. If you do have questions, hold them to the end and we'll either answer them at the end or send you over to the tables where you can get the one on one. And if you're having trouble hearing me, just wave your hands wildly in the back and I'll try to modulate that. To start off with, we are the open organization of lock pickers, which means we are ethical hackers. We teach ethical lock picking. The way we do that is by following these two rules. One, do not pick locks which you do not own, variety of reasons for that. First, it's an optics problem. A lot of people think lock picking is either illegal or immoral. It is in most cases neither. Since we teach ethical lock picking, that's legal everywhere. If you're picking locks which you do not own, you risk the, you run the risk of committing burglary if you succeed. So don't pick locks you don't own because it doesn't look good and you could accidentally break the law. Number two, do not pick locks upon which you rely. That includes even locks you own, even if it's your front door lock, don't pick it because if you're here, probably by definition you're a novice lock picker and you're more likely to break picks off in the lock or damage the locks, in which case then a lock you rely on now is no longer in working order. So help us improve the image of lock picking and stay on the right side of the law by following these two rules. That emphatically goes for anything here in the venue. If you buy lock picks from us, do not hack anything in the venue. We're not gonna back you up one bit on that. Kind of lock opening we're gonna be talking about. There's lock picking, there's what you might call quick and dirty techniques and then there's covert and high tech. Lock picking is what we're gonna be teaching today. That's using picks in the lock to address the lock as a coherent system to work with it on its own terms. There's quick and dirty techniques which you're familiar with. The most common of is just take a credit card, slide it down the side of the door. Maybe that works, maybe it doesn't, but you're not engaging with the lock at all. You're attacking the latch. That's a great bypass technique. It's not really a lock picking technique. Finally, covert and high tech stuff. These are hardware exploits. There's something wrong with the design of the lock, not the manufacturing of the lock. I need to talk louder or slower. Okay, I'll try to do that. The last one, fascinating stuff, not really our bag, at least not to teach here, not in a non-professional capacity. We're gonna focus on picking the lock. Here's what lock picking looks like. If you have seen lock picking in the movies on TV in video games, you have almost certainly seen it wrong because if it doesn't have two hands doing two different things using two different tools, then that's probably not real lock picking. So I wanna put this up front so you'll have seen it at least right one time before we start. Two different hands with two different tools doing two different things. We'll talk about what those things are, but I want you to see it right once. Type of picks we're gonna be talking about, they look like this. If you pull out your keys, probably gonna look like that standard pin tumbler shape. You see it in dead bolts. You see it in padlocks. Pretty much everywhere you go in North America. If there's a lock, it probably looks like this. You're used to seeing it from the outside. So this is a schematic view of something you're used to seeing which you're probably less used to seeing is the inside of it. So now we've passed from the introductory portion to the mechanical portion. Here's what's going on. We've got that plug right there. That's what turns. That's ultimately what we want to happen. Preventing it from turning is a pair of pins. Not one pin, two pins. It's important because they separate. The key pin there, that's the red pin, above it is the driver pin. We try to use functional names for them because you can install them upside down as they do in Europe often. Since they've been doing it longer, they say we install ours upside down so we compromise, we give them functional names. The lock works just fine if you turn it upside down because the spring there takes away the effect of gravity and it means the whole lock works just fine no matter what orientation. When you try to turn a pin without a key, you see how that GIF shows that it's gonna turn a little bit but not very far. That's the plug trying to turn but being prevented from the driver pin. That blue pin right there, that driver pin, its job is to be in the way unless and until the correct key is placed in there. You'll be unsurprised to find that the peaks and valleys on the key correspond to the lengths of the key pins. You put in the right key, it pushes up the key pin to the right amount and that split between the two pins there lines up with the split between the plug that turns and the housing that doesn't. If there's anything at that shear line right there, we call that the shear line because it's two things sliding by each other, just like a shear line fault for those of you from California. Okay, that wasn't the funniest joke but I expected something. If there's anything at that shear line there, the lock won't open. So your job is to make sure there's nothing at that shear line. A key by its nature will solve that problem. As soon as this GIF loads, that's pin the butt running it on a net book but as soon as the GIF loads, it'll show you that a key pushes up the key pin to the right height, meaning that the shear line there matches up with the shear line there and the plug can turn. If you have multiple springs, multiple driver pins, multiple key pins, you'll see in its normal standard configuration without a key in there that there's driver pins all along the shear line and those key pins are different height. So if you ever wondered, all the variation comes from the key pins, the driver pins are uniform. The key will slide in there and it will make up the difference of each one of those key pins and when each one of the key pins has been pushed up to the right height, then there'll be nothing at the shear line and the lock will open. This is one of the better animations of the whole presentation is this is pretty sexy. As long as it's not, you know, glitching out. We'll watch it one more time. You'll see that everything goes up and down, up and down until it finally falls into the correct slot at which point that shear line will be perfectly clear. No. That lock will open. Anything short of a perfectly clear shear line is almost but not quite open, which is very similar to locked. This lock is almost but not quite open. Clear, clear, clear, clear. There's your problem. Hasn't been pushed high enough. That lock is almost open, AKA locked. Here's the opposite problem. The key pins don't start off in the way but can easily be pushed up in the way if you push it too high. So this lock, opposite problem, key pins in the way, shear lines blocked, still won't open. This is an important step to realize is that a lot of people think, I'm just gonna pick the lock by pushing everything up to the top. That's simple. I'm just gonna shove it in there, push everything up to the top. And not quite there. You're replacing one problem with another. Doesn't matter whether there's a driver pin at the shear line or a key pin at the shear line. If there's anything at the shear line, the lock won't open. All right. We are now leaving the world of keys and we're now starting to worry about things that only lock pickers care about. Or else just jumping ahead one slide. Go back. Go back. Thank you. All right. This is an example of a perfect world. We do not live in such a world but I want you to think about it for a second. In a perfect world, those holes in the top of the plug, that's a top view of the plug where the holes have been drilled in the brass, those holes would be perfectly aligned, laser aligned right down the center. So what would happen if you tried to turn that plug without a key, it wouldn't open because you got the driver pins in the way, doing their job as driver pins. Each driver pins job is to be in the way and each and every one is doing their job working together to keep the plug from turning because they're all in line. Every time you turn it, each and every one of those gets pinched on the shear line. The lock doesn't open. In fact, the lock doesn't budge at all. However, that's a perfect world. We don't live in such a world. We live in the real world. In the real world, you can see that these are not perfect holes by any stretch and more importantly, they're not perfectly aligned down that center line. So when it looks more like that in the real world that we live in, the pins are the same thing. The pins have miscasting and they've got rest and they've got all sorts of gnarly things which means the world we live in looks more similar to this. This line, it's subtle here, but you can see that there's a bit of snakiness here. Is that visible from the back that those are not exactly aligned? That's an exaggeration. Normally you can't see it with your regular eyeballs. It doesn't matter if you can see it. If it's there, it only matters that physically the lock lines up differently. So now I want you to do a mental experiment where you take these misaligned holes and you drop springs, driver pins and key pins into each one of those, put it in the lock and now give it a turn. Now it's not gonna open, it's not that bad. It's gonna turn a little bit and when it turns it's gonna stop on one of the driver pins. The key word is it's gonna stop on one of the driver pins because since they're not all aligned they can't work together. It's like having a football defensive line where one of the guys is forward and all the rest of them are back. One of the guys is gonna get clobbered because he's gonna take the whole weight of the team. Our sports metaphor is really a good one for this crowd. Okay, thank you. So instead, what I want you to imagine is when this plug turns, one of those is pinching. Simulate this in your head. If you're turning that plug a little bit and one of those is getting pinched, you're gonna have a different pressure profile if you're to reach in and lift up on those. Imagine you had a hand, a very small hand and you went in like this. Reach up. If you reach up on the first one, what's it gonna feel? It's gonna feel springy. You're gonna feel the weight of that spring and those pins are so small that the weight hardly matters. You're not even even gonna detect them. What you're gonna feel mostly is the spring. Springy here, springy here and here, springy as well. This one is gonna be odd man out. It's not gonna be like the others because in addition to that spring, you're gonna feel a little scraping, binding, grinding, metal on metal feeling of a machine being used in a way that's not supposed to be used which is in fact exactly what's happening. The lock is gonna leak information. If you turn it a little bit, bind that one pin, then it will tell you that is the pin that is most out of line. That's the one that's in the way. If you got something in the way, what do you do? You move it out of the way. You reach under there, you lift it up, you feel that binding, grinding sensation. You lift it up just enough until that shear line there matches up to that shear line and you get a little feedback. What's that feedback gonna feel like? Sorry, I can't tell you what it'll feel like every time on every lock but it'll feel like maybe a click, maybe you'll feel a sound, maybe it'll feel just like a little bit of give. That's your cue, that one is set and it's time to move on. Now when I say set, here's what I'm talking about. If you push up on that red pin, that key pin, you push it up high enough that the driver pin that was in the way is now just above the shear line and it's no longer in the way. An amazing thing happens, auto save. As soon as you set the driver pin to the right height, the driver pin is no longer in the way, that plug that's been wanting to turn, wanting to turn, wanting to turn, now it turns and the hole that that driver pin was in, that hole disappears, the door shuts behind it. It can't go home again. As long as you keep constant gentle pressure, as long as it doesn't turn backwards, in this case counterclockwise on you, then that pin is set and will never come back down. That's not a design feature, that's a design bug that we exploit. So here's what it looks like. This is just emphasized that the spring and the driver pin are gonna be isolated from the key pin. The key pin is free to move freely. You can push it up and down all day long. It's gonna accomplish nothing. You should probably leave it alone because there's nothing you can do here except mess up your nice set. Once you have that one pin set, the plug is gonna turn. How far is it gonna turn? Only until it runs into the next driver pin that's in the way. What are you gonna do with that driver pin? Find it, find the bind, and then lift it up until that one's out of the way. The plug will advance a little bit more and you're on your next pin. You do that as many times as there are pins in the lock. The lock will open, I guarantee you. I'm gonna back up one slide just so this animation doesn't fire prematurely. Here's the next thing that I wanna have generally in your head. When you are acting as a member of the key using public, the rubric in your brain is take the key, put it in the door, turn the key. Put the key in, turn the key. When you're using the lock picks, I want you to flip that around because when you have a key, you set the pins and then you turn the lock. When you don't have a key, I need you to turn first because only until you turn, only when you turn can you find the binding pin. The binding pin is created by that plug turning and then getting stopped on one of the pins. So if you're gonna pick a lock, turn first, then that creates the bind. Do your job then, find the bind, solve the bind. Find the next bind, solve the next bind. Here's how it looks like in practice. We put the turning tool in, we give it a little bit of tension. That creates the bind. Where's the bind? We don't know. It's somewhere, it's random in every lock but it's consistent over the life of that lock. Now we're looking for the bind. We weigh each one of those. What are we feeling for? Is it springy or is it something other than springy? Is it scrappy, is it binding, is it grinding, is it catching, call it whatever you like. 50-50 discrimination. Is it springy or is it not springy? Find the one that's binding, push it up to the right height until it gives you a click, gives you some kind of feedback, don't push it too far and then move on. In locks with only a few pins, this is pretty simple. There's no mental bookkeeping required. In locks with multiple pins, four, five and six, it helps to keep track of which ones you've picked. You gotta keep an accurate mental model in your head. When you get to the last one, that's the only one in the way. When you move that one out of the way, the lock will open instantaneously. There's no need to turn. You've been turning since the very beginning and you've just been solving your barriers that are in the way. Does anybody wanna see that again or we wanna move on to the next one? All right, we'll do it in practice. Here's the biggest way to screw up. Yes. Pins differ from lock to lock to lock. Padlock four is a standard amount. Door lock five and six is a standard amount. The question was how many pins in a standard lock? There's not exactly a standard lock, but generally four in a padlock, five and six in a door lock. I'm gonna start this one over because I wanna draw your attention to what's going on here. This is the most common mistake. This lock picker's gonna do everything right for two pins and then screw up on the third one. We're weighing each one of those pins. We're looking for the bind. Once we find the bind, we're gonna lift it to the right height and it's gonna set that pin. Gonna set one right. Notice how this pin and this pin are relatively short compared to that one. So this lock picker gets used to pushing it high. It's gonna mess them up because they're gonna push that one too high. As long as you have tension on there, this lock will never open until the end of time. The only way to get out of this, let go of your tension, lose your progress. You have to shake the whole edge of sketch. So my rule, my suggestion to you is remember that this is a precision exercise and you're moving a millimeter at a time and you're sensing very small changes inside the lock. When in doubt, leave it alone. Say, hey, that was enough. I can always come back but if I do it too hard, I'm gonna freeze the whole lock and the most likely way I'm gonna have to get out of that is by losing all my progress. So think of a haircut or think of salting the soup. It's really easy to go back and do more. It's really hard to go back and do less. We're gonna, now we've moved from the theory of lock picking into the practice. What tools we wanna use. I wanna talk briefly about raking which is the opposite of single pin picking. When you're single pin picking, you're touching each pin at a time and giving it, it's like table service. Sir, what would you like? Let me get that for you, sir, right away, sir. This is buffet style. Each pin knows two things. You're relying on the fact that each pin, sorry, I haven't been speaking to the mic. You're relying on the fact that each pin knows that it has a particular height that it wants and a particular order in which it wants to get picked. So you're gonna give them a whole variety of heights and figure when it comes time for that pin to set, it will set itself even if you don't know what's happening. And it looks like this. You put the tension tool in, you put a little tension on. It creates a bind. We don't care which one's a binding pin because we're gonna run through there and we're gonna set and unset a whole bunch in a row. And once each one gets its particular pin, its particular height, it'll set and it's a very fast way to open a lot of locks. It's not a fast way to open good locks but it's a fast way to open cheap locks. It won't make you better at picking but it's a great way to impress anti-M at Thanksgiving. So if you're starting off in the tables, I recommend you look for one of these two. We call those single pin picks. It's good for hitting one pin at a time, great for learning. You'll find those on the tables. Don't start off with raking. It's not exactly a dark side technique but it's more just a shortcut and it won't make you any better at picking locks overall. It's good for opening A lock. It's not good for getting good at opening locks. I'm skipping over this. The big thing I wanna get to you since we're running a little bit behind is counting pins. Counting pins find something with a flat back on it. These half diamond look great. If you wanna see how many pins are in something and it's not labeled on the outside, many of them are, they'll say basic one, two, three, four, five, six. That's how many pins is in it. Locks in real life are rarely labeled. In fact, I've never encountered one. So if you don't know what's going on inside the lock, count the pins. Put something under the flat back, push everything up to the top and then as you pull it out slowly, listen for those clicks. For each click, there's a pin. You have to do it multiple times but all you're hearing is that spring shooting the pin back down. Do that a couple of times until you get the same number a few times in a row. That's how many pins are in the lock. If you're just starting off and you hear one or two clicks, that's great, that's a good place to start. If you hear four, five, or six picks, come back and get it later. Turning tools are the unsung heroes here. They're the supporting cast that should get the Oscar but never do. Turning tools is how you put that all-important turn on. First, last and always, you're putting constant, gentle pressure. If you don't have a good turning tool, you don't use your turning tool right. It's gonna make the lock a whole lot harder to pick. The chief way that people make the lock harder to pick is by putting too much tension on here. Again, this is a precision exercise so I encourage you to do what you can to put less tension. This is the wrong way to do it. You would know that even if I wasn't up here telling you because of the infomercial rule. It comes first and it's in the black and white one. This is the person who can't boil water and needs a snuggie because they don't know how to use a blanket. Don't be this guy and you tell it's a guy because he chooses fingers. Instead of using your big fat thumb and pulling which is an inaccurate way to deliver force, I want you to use a precision digit like your index finger and wrap it around the lock and push. You can push up here but you can push even better by going very lightly out on the end. And when you're out on the end there, principle of leverage means that you can use a very light tension to get the same amount of push and it doubles the feeling of any response that you get from the lock. A little jiggle down here will be magnified and you get that much more sensation. Since this is a precision exercise, you want all the data you can get. Good turning tool pressure looks like this. Barely a dent in the finger but the finger looks all healthy. If you're pushing down so hard that you're defeating your capillary refill and your finger's turning white, that is not only too hard, that is far, far too hard. Because remember, all the push you do there gets translated down to there. All the turning that gets there gets translated into the single pin that you're trying to move. So this is standing on something that you're trying to move. Please don't do that. It'll be frustrating to you because you won't be opening locks and you'll be more likely to bend the tools. We're gonna skip over that. That's what turning tools look like. Again, they don't look fancy so people forget about them but they're key. We're gonna skip that, skip that. On our tables, most locks open in most directions. In real life, you're a little more constrained but we try to make it easy for you. Padlocks tend to open to the right. Some shlags, they open right. Other key and knobs open to the left again. Anything on our tables probably doesn't matter if you have any questions to ask or just try to pick it and see if you can meet with success. But turning direction tends to be clockwise unless there's a countervailing reason to go other ways. As I said, they're labeled on the tables. These aren't labeled. I can tell you, or you can try it and I will confirm how many's in there. You can learn how to count pins. This is new. The silver part is the front part. And the brown part was sort of the puckering. That's the back. If you're just starting off, I recommend going in the front. Uh-oh, we're frozen. We'll make it. While I'm vamping, any questions? Oh good, I've tried to answer all of them. Oh, that's cute, give me a second. The question was, I showed two different kinds of single pin picks. Is there a difference between them? The half diamond versus the hook. It's a purely matter of personal preference. In my experience, the hook tends to make people a little bit more likely to over lift because that hook motion makes them more likely to dig and really get up there. So if you find you're having trouble with overlifting, then maybe avoid the hook. It's got its uses, it's a really good one because it forces you to accurately register on a particular pin rather than sliding back and forth in more of a raking motion. So they've got their strength and weaknesses but if you find you're having trouble staying on a particular pin, then gravitate toward the hook. If you find you're having trouble with overlifting, then gravitate toward the half diamond. Here's the exercise I want you to do if you're just starting off. This is really worth the price of admission here. I want you to find one that says basic one on it. This is exactly what it looks like inside. It's got a spring and driver pin and a key pin. Don't put any tension on it. I know I said when you're picking a lock, start with the tension, you're not picking it just yet. I want you to get the feel for it. Reach in there with a pick, either one, either the hook or the half diamond and just lift up on that pin. You're not trying to open the lock right now, you're not turning the lock. All I want you to do is feel what that pin feels like when you're lifting up on it. What's the spring feel like? Where is it? What's the weight feel like? Get that in your head because then I want you to put tension on and lift it again and you get that 50-50 differential between what's the pin feel like when it's not under pressure versus when it is under pressure. You could think of it as what's it feel like when it's springy? What's it feel like when it's scrappy? If you can make that discrimination, then you can pick the lock much more reliably. Once you put the tension on, then of course lift it up. Then of course lift it up. There we go. Once you lift it up to the right height, the lock will open instantly. Congratulations, that counts as a lock. Put a very simple lock. Do it again and get used to that feeling. This is the time when I take a moment out to editorialize and say, I've been lying to you a little bit. The reason I've been lying to you is I've been implying that you'll be able to feel that discrimination all the time right off the bat. It takes a lot of practice. It's very subtle. It will probably be below your noise threshold most of the time when you start off. This is about lowering your noise threshold. In the meantime, you will still be able to pick locks by lifting gently up on each pin. As long as you don't lift too high and freeze the whole system, you'll be able to pick a lot of locks just by lifting them up a little bit. So even if you find yourself in a fog and blind and don't know which is the right pin, try lifting gently on each one and you'll be able to pick a lot of locks that way. But the whole time you're doing that, be attentive to what feedback you're getting. Is this one more springy or more scrappy? Did I feel it set? I don't want you to get frustrated just because you can't feel the bind at any given time, but I want you looking out to see when you do feel the bind, be excited because that's your sign that you become your more proficient and methodical picker. Finally, I want to bring your attention to this, which is the most common way that people actually affect the pins inside. The question that people ask me is Preston, you told me what I'm supposed to do inside the lock. What do I do outside the lock to make that happen? And the answer is it doesn't matter. You can hold the pick any way you want. You can stand on your head if you want, as long as inside the lock, you're able to make small controlled moves and get feedback out. This is the most common thing that happens is they kind of put it down along the bottom of the lock, maybe rest it on their finger and they're kind of doing this rocking lifting, this digging motion. That's fine as long as rocking lifting doesn't turn into crow barring. If you're putting too much pressure on the lock, if you're pushing too hard, then you're locking down the whole system and you're really having to dig at that pin and eventually it means that you're gonna start bending the pick and then the pick is useless, we have to throw it away, replace it and it costs more to run these things. So for your own benefit as lock pickers and for our benefit as people putting on these events, please take the kiddie's advice, relax, chill out, talk to some people, distract yourself a little bit and if you find you're having some trouble, try loosening your tension and when you finally do get it, I want you to say open. Say it out loud, say it proud, no matter which lock you're on, every lock open is a success. Take a moment, celebrate that and then once you get it, go back and do that same one again so that you know you've got it. And since I just killed the presentation I think that's the end anyway. If you've got any questions, I'll be circulating around here afterward or you can find anybody in a black shirt to ask questions to. Once again, we're the open organization of lock pickers, I'm Preston. Thank you so much for coming.