New device opens hotel room locks

[necroscope]

The Darker side of electronics at work This new device opens hotel room locks.

[chrome]

new device

This is like half a year old at least

[FenderBender]

LOL an Arduino in the how-to video.

[GeoffS]

Not exactly news.
The manufacturer has a fix for this and, after some pressure, is upgrading the locks affected.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/12/06/lock-firm-onity-starts-to-shell-out-for-security-fixes-to-hotels-hackable-locks/

[necroscope]

Well sorry for posting a six month old story,Thought it had some revelance down here in australia as we have those locks on most hotels down here and the chances of the USA company fixing the locks in australia may well be remote at best,The intention of the thread was more a heads up for travellers.

[SeanB]

Interesting, will pass it on to a friend who deals with places using these locks to check if they have been upgraded.

[G7PSK]

Next time you book into a hotel take some chewing gum or blue tack  or even epoxy putty to ram into the port that will stop the connection being made and will take somewhat more than a few minuets to remove from the port

[SeanB]

A 5ml syringe self mixing pack of epoxy and a small tape piece will make your room secure from this attack. Hotel maintenance though will not like it..............

[M. András]

i dont get the idea why did they left that dataport accesible on the first time?

[SeanB]

Laziness in that otherwise they would need tools to update the lock firmware if they were to add features or bugfixes.

[M. András]

if lazyness was the driving thing then a simple encryption would be much more effort from the manufacturer

[SeanB]

Not from the manufacturer but from the users, who would have to use tools and such terribly technical stuff, and would not just use the most cheap illiterate staff to go from door to door and plug in and press a button,.mMnimal intelligence required, just can walk and breath, though chewing gum at the same time might cause a failure.

[Jon Chandler]

I had one of the little in-room safes that uses a mag-stripe card to open die once with my stuff inside because of a dead battery.  I don't recall the exact sequence of steps required to open it manually but it wasn't that difficult for the maintenance guy to get it open to change the batteries.