08 April 2020

Practical Lock Picking by Deviant Ollam

Security engineering ranges many fields. One of those fields is physical security. Historically one of the main pillars of physical security are locks, like you can find at doors, safes, drawers or treasure chests. Knowing how they work and how they can be subverted to make them open should be part of any security engineer expertise. Too often, the access card to the super-critical-Data-Processing-Center is kept inside a mere office drawer with a simple waffer lock.

Practical Lock Picking is written by a professional lock-picker in a clean and simple manner. Currently it focuses in to lock kinds: pine and waffer. Actually that covers 90% of doors and drawers nowadays. Author starts by describing both locks manufacturing process to enumerate their usual manufacturing defects, defects that can be used make them open. Afterwards, book describes usual methods and tools to make those locks open. Everything is plenty of diagrams to explain visually every step.

Although, author is a professional he is aware that his potentials readers are newcomers to this topic, so explanations are very detailed and he makes a real effort to put himself in a newbie feet. So he offers advice about how to start a collection of training locks and lock-picking locks, at a low initial cost and following a progressive difficulty when trying new locks.

Overall, this book is good and I find it a must have for any security engineer bookshelf.