Attacking Classified Safes & Vaults from the Cold War to Now

The speaker, a safe technician and physical security specialist, frames the talk around how classified containers are defeated in practice. He explains that a safe's real purpose is to make an attacker's effort so costly that the payoff is not worth it. He then walks through common countermeasures, including glass relockers, chemical traps, and hardened plates, and describes how technicians drill, repair, and conceal entry points in a container.

The middle of the talk is a history of attacks that do not leave obvious damage. It covers manipulation of lock wheels, vibration attacks that accidentally opened naval safes at sea, and duress codes and time locks. It also covers manipulation-resistant designs and the electromechanical locks that followed. A large thread concerns Cold War radiographic attacks, including a Polish espionage unit that used radioactive isotopes and film to read the wheels inside locks. The talk also describes a government lock whose weakness was known for years while its manufacturer worked to suppress the research.

The closing argument is that protection should match what is being guarded, and that personal valuables are better served by distributing copies across trusted places than by concentrating them in one container. The speaker ends by pointing listeners to follow-up discussion in the lockpick village.