It can be reprogrammed by placing the original key in the lock and inserting a tool into a slot in the lock face, which moves the assembly back about an eight of an inch and separates the pins and slider and holds them apart while a new key is inserted. The smartkey is a five-pin lock and has 6 depth increments (the height and depth of the mountains and valleys on a key). It's business as usual." Without the key, there's no way to open the locks, the technician asserted, and "sticking anything foreign inside of the keyway is just going to make it that much harder to open up." You can't put any type of wire or anything like that."Īnother technician told him, "If it was that easy to pick a Kwikset lock, they would be having us doing recalls, there's nothing like that. "There's no tool that you can just put in the cylinder and pop it open. "There's racks from up and down direction, not just up" that make it impossible to align the springs in the lock, she said. "With these ones you cannot even put a flat screwdriver in there," a technician named Satima on the company's support line told him during a recent phone call, which Tobias recorded. Kwikset did not respond to requests for comment from WIRED, but Tobias, in phone calls to technical support for Kwikset, was told repeatedly that the locks were impervious to screwdrivers or wires, and that a screwdriver wouldn't even fit in the keyway. The standard requires that a lock like this can withstand 300 pound inches of torque, but the researchers say they used much less than this to open the locks. He filed a formal complaint with the BHMA two years ago, but says the standards body has ignored it. Tobias says the BHMA rating is misleading to consumers, fooling them into believing the locks are secure when they aren't. He and Bluzmanis developed a number of techniques to compromise the locks, including one that lets them thwart it with a four-inch screwdriver and torque wrench, and another that lets them crack the lock just as easily with a wire. It's not a pin-tumbler lock so that it doesn't have the inherent physical strength to block the plug from turning when you do certain things." "There's a lot of positives for Kwikset, but the problem is they can be opened in 15 seconds with a screwdriver and a paper clip. "It's very clever because the consumer can instantly reprogram the key, but it's also insecure," Tobias says.
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