Safes

Safe-cracking is the process of opening a safe, generally without the authorization or knowledge of the safe's owner. It may also refer to a computer hacker's attempts to break into a secured computer system. more...

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Physical safe-cracking

Different procedures may be used to crack a safe, depending on its construction.

Lock manipulation

The most surreptitious way of cracking a safe is to manipulate the lock in order to obtain the combination required to open the safe without actually damaging the safe.

Some rotary combination locks can be manipulated by feel or sound in order to determine the combination required to open the safe. More sophisticated locks use wheels made from lightweight and soft materials such as nylon, which reduces this vulnerability. Another anti-manipulation mechanism is serrated wheels (false tumbler notches) that make tactile techniques much more difficult. Another defense is a clutch-type driver wheel that prevents contact of the fence to the tumblers except in one position. These locks are identified by a "click-click" feeling in the dial or the dial is required to be pushed in and turned. Manipulation is the locksmith's preferred choice in lost-combination lockouts, since it requires no repairs or damage, but can be extremely time consuming due to lock improvements over the years, and is also a difficult art to master.

In the absence of any other information regarding the safe's combination, a combination lock may be opened by dialing every possible combination. Richard Feynman discovered that many combination locks allow some "slop" in the settings of the dial, so that for a given safe it may be necessary only to try a subset of the combinations. This drastically reduces the time required to exhaust the number of meaningful combinations. A further reduction in solving time is obtained by trying all possible settings for the last wheel for a given setting of the first wheels before nudging the next-to-last wheel to its next meaningful setting, instead of zeroing the lock each time with a number of turns in one direction.

Guessing or stealing the combination

A safe may be compromised surprisingly often by guessing the combination. This results from the fact that manufactured safes often come with a manufacturer-set combination. This combination is designed to allow the owner initial access to the safe so that they may set their own new combination.

Combinations are also unwittingly compromised by the owner of the safe by having the lock set to easy-to-guess combinations such as a birthdate or driver's license number.

Sources exist which list manufacturers try-out combinations.

Another known way to obtain the combination is to steal it. A safe is only as secure as its combination.

Read more at Wikipedia.org