This past weekend I was up in Nashville attending PhreakNIC X where I was giving a presentation on lock picking along with Sysmin and Quigon. We (The Hackerpimps) hosted a regular lock picking contest as well as a drunken lock picking contest. It was a blast.

Overall, the presentations were great (though I missed a lot of them). I especially enjoyed Acidus’ presentation on Smashing Web 2.0 for Fun and Profit!. It demonstrated a stunning array of vulnerabilities in AJAX applications that made me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

Throughout day 2 we had a table setup along with Dosman from PacketSniffers.org where people could try their hand at lock picking. Everyone had a great time tearing through our massive combined collection of locks. Dosman’s collection dwarfed our own, however. He had DOM dimple locks, bump keys, antique locks, shims, a pick gun, and some excellent custom-made boards setup with regular door locks and deadbolts.

The Hackerpimps collection consisted entirely of padlocks: The entire Master Lock line, most of the Brinks high security padlocks, some cheap Chinese-made padlocks (generic a la Wal-Mart), and some easy Taskforce locks. Sysmin also brought along a very special military-grade Sargent & Greenleaf padlock that had ~8 pins with a Medeco cylinder. No one was able to pick it. I tried, but I can’t say that I got very close. I look forward to borrowing the lock from Sysmin in the future to give it a real go (time was limited at the con).

I didn’t take very many pics, but I’ll be uploading them soon. I need to sanitize my presentation and upload it to the HackerPimps website first.