Pierluigi Paganini May 15, 2015

The security expert Samy Kamkar after the disclosure of a method to easily crack many Master padlock combinations designed Combo Breaker to mechanize it.

A couple of weeks ago, the popular security expert Samy Kamkar revealed a method to easily crack many Master padlock combinations in eight tries or less.

Unfortunately, it is not so complicated to crack a Master padlock with the right instruments, the right software could easily allow it and for this reason Kamkar decided to mechanize the process with a Combo Breaker device.

The design of Combo Breaker is very simple as effective, it uses a stepper motor to rotate the Master Lock combination dial, a second servo motor that makes the attempt to open the mechanism, Arduino chip as controller on which the software designed by the expert run, and a 3D printer used to produce the parts composing the Combo Breaker device.

“Combo Breaker is a motorized, battery powered, 3D printed, Arduino-based combination lock cracking device. It is portable, open source, 3D models provided, and exploits a new technique I’ve discovered for cracking combination locks in 8 attempts or less, but in an even more exciting, automated fashion.” wrote Kamkar in a blog post.

At this point you have all the necessary to crack the Master lock, just insert it in the Combo Breaker and run the software that will take about five minutes to discover the right the combination,  but don’t worry a professional thief takes much less time 😉.

The bad news is that the process could be drastically improved by finding the first digit of the combination, in this case the Combo Breaker can find the combination in 30 seconds or less.

Kamkar explained that the Combo Breaker isn’t guaranteed to work on all Master Lock combination dial mechanisms, in some cases, in fact, the system was not able to crack the padlock.

I’m a big fan of Samy, that’s why I desire to propose you also some of his works:

• KeySweeper, a cheap USB charger can record keystrokes wirelessly (January 2015)
• USBdriveby. a device designed to quickly and covertly install a backdoor and override DNS settings on an unlocked machine via USB (December 2014).
• SkyJack software designed to allow an attacker to gain the control over a drone while it’s still flying.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs –  Master padlock, Combo Breaker)