If you follow physical security and specifically the “Locksport” community you might be interested in the open letter by Peter Field (chief architect of Medeco products) stating that Medeco (a big high security lock manufacturer) is embracing the Locksport community. This is huge news considering that lock manufacturers in general have been pretty reluctant to support the research of Marc Tobias and others in the past. From Marc’s post on In.Security:
“So it often falls upon the Locksport enthusiasts, hackers, or security professional, outside of the lock manufacturing community, to demonstrate vulnerabilities that should have been discovered by the manufacturer before offering their products for sale. In my experience, design engineers learn how to make things work quite well; they rarely are educated in how to break them. That is a fundamental problem. If locks were designed properly, hackers and others would not be able to circumvent security. It is about time that manufacturers recognized that the more minds that are evaluating their products, the better.”
You can read the full open letter posted on NDE here. Very good read as well as Marc’s response. By the way, check out NDE (Non-Destructive Entry) magazine. It’s a good magazine on the Locksport community and lock picking in general. Issue #3 even has a good article about the “Tiger Team” show that had a short appearance last year on TrueTV.