LockPickingLawyer
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2023–2025
7:01 · 6.5M views · Feb 26, 2022
LockPickingLawyer examines a challenge involving a tamper-sealed Abus lock and shows how the tamper seal can be defeated.
Referenced in security threads as proof that tamper-evident seals and stickers can be bypassed.
3 comments from Hacker News
Assuming this was done at the government's request, I assume Hetzner is more than willing to comply with a court order mandating they allow them to monitor and physically size a machine. And outside of nation-state requests, even ignoring the fact that someone could probably pay-off an employee, I think ease would depend a lot on the datacenter and target; judging by the awesome and hilarious story behind the Fremont Cabal accidentally becoming an internet exchange by essentially having some dude barely secretly slipping unauthorized cables into the raceways [1], I figure there are a lot of places where if your target is simply renting a couple rack units or single rack rather than an entire locked cage, you can probably get physical access by doing the same. Also, a lot of Deviant Ollam's stories about industrial security and the dozens of ways he's broken into utility companies, server rooms, etc — mostly just by being confident, looking the part, bad doors [2], and badge cloning [3] — don't give me a ton of confidence that someone with skill couldn't feasibly either get direct access to servers they shouldn't, or at the very least, access to an important part of the supply chain for their target. And speaking of supply chain, my processor died recently, so I ordered a brand-new in box replacement Ryzen, and when it arrived last night, out of curiosity, I wanted to see if I could get the CPU out of the box without breaking the tamper-evident authenticity seal... ... and abo
The person you replied to didn't explain the full concept - it's not just nail polish, it's nail polish with glitter in to create a unique pattern that the attacker wouldn't be able to replicate. Unfortunately... I've seen a video of somebody defeating this concept before, not by trying to recreate the pattern with new nail polish and glitter, but by using a chemical (I can't remember what) that lets them, gently and very carefully, remove the whole layer of nail polish in one piece rather than having to break it apart, and then afterwards they stuck it back in place such that it looked identical. So it's not as secure an idea as it's often considered to be. Edit: actually my memory was slightly wrong. The video I was remembering wasn't about defeating glitter in nail polish on a screw, but about "tamper proof" stickers which are made for the same purpose. I don't know for sure if nail polish could equally be defeated, but I suspect so. Here's that video (LockPickingLawyer defeating a tamper proof sticker): this video
Tamper seals are enh. I uh… well Hey here’s a YouTube video on it: this video And let’s not even discuss software exploits