{"id":3930,"date":"2015-09-11T22:11:12","date_gmt":"2015-09-12T02:11:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/?p=3930"},"modified":"2015-09-12T09:14:08","modified_gmt":"2015-09-12T13:14:08","slug":"tsa-backdoors-are-still-backdoors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/11\/tsa-backdoors-are-still-backdoors\/","title":{"rendered":"Backdoors are backdoors, even when they belong to the TSA"},"content":{"rendered":"

3D printers are useful devices, and I’ve seen people make some extremely cool things with them. Today, I read about a 3D printer creation<\/a> that’s so incredibly awesome, I’m just bursting at the seams to share the news. But I need to give some background information first.<\/p>\n

If you’ve done any traveling during the last few years, you’ve undoubtedly seen a TSA lock<\/a>. These are standard run-of-the-mill luggage locks, with one special (anti-)feature: they’re designed to be opened with a special TSA “master key”. This is done in the name of making it easier to for TSA to mess with your luggage<\/span> security. A TSA agent can pop in one of their master keys, open your lock, go through your luggage, and no one will be the wiser.<\/p>\n

With all of the airports in the United States, one would expect there to be lots of TSA master keys floating around. A set of these keys wound up on the internet<\/a> as high definition images. From there, it didn’t take long for the photographs to be turned into 3D-models<\/a>, and now anyone can print their own.<\/p>\n

That is one very cool hack!<\/p>\n

My own luggage lock is labelled TSA007; here’s what that key looks like<\/p>\n

\"TSA007\"<\/p>\n

From my time hanging out at the TOOOL<\/a> table during security conferences, it doesn’t look like a difficult lock to pick, even without an 007 key handy. (Hopefully there’s a TOOOL member out there who’s willing to comment on the level of difficulty involved in picking a TSA-approved lock.)<\/p>\n

There’s a very important lesson to be learned from this. A lock is a security device, and a TSA-approved lock is a security device with a backdoor. Backdoors don’t care who uses them, and it’s only a matter of time before the secret keys to the backdoor find their way into the public. This is true for locks, and it’s doubly-true for encryption.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

3D printers are useful devices, and I’ve seen people make some extremely cool things with them. Today, I read about a 3D printer…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88,"featured_media":3936,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Backdoors are backdoors, even when they belong to the #TSA","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[32,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-slider","category-security"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/tsakeys3dprinted2.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1W8mg-11o","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3930"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3937,"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3930\/revisions\/3937"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masspirates.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}