Gallagher Transport is proud to report that our client, Niwot based electronics company, Spark Fun Electronics, wowed the hacking community at the security event Def Con for creating a robot that cracked open a locked safe in under 30 minutes!
In her Denver Post article, Tamara Chuang reported that Spark Fun’s former CEO took on the challenge of cracking a locked safe as Christmas Gift / dare from his wife! “Nathan Seidle, SparkFun’s founder, had earlier shared with Wired magazine (and even earlier blogged about it on SparkFun’s site) about how his DIY-robot was able to unlock a Sentry Safe, a Christmas gift from his wife. Essentially, Seidle built a robot using a mix of parts from SparkFun and other companies, including its $20 Arduino board.
To narrow down the 1 million possible combinations — which would take four months to try one every 10 seconds — Seidle looked for shortcuts and found a key one.
Within one of the safe’s rotors aimed at preventing humans from using pressure and listening for an unlocking mechanism, Seidle’s robot could detect the silent difference that humans cannot. In the demo for Wired, the robot cracked the safe in 15 minutes.”
For those of you REALLY interested, you can watch the exciting 15 min video of the demo that Seidle did for WIRED magazine.