put us in a state of higher risk. This chapter takes a look at the security issues surrounding
existing electronic door locks, their wireless mechanisms, and their integration with mobile
devices. We will step through these topics in the next few sections, exploring the current secu-
rity mechanisms (or lack thereof) in electronic door locks. After establishing the bad security
decisions manufacturers might be making, we will be more aware of potential risks and have
a better idea what securing these types of locks will require in the future.
Hotel Door Locks and Magnetic Stripes
One of the more popular door-lock vulnerabilities, discovered by researcher Cody Brocious,
affects millions of door locks installed in hotels around the world. Given its potential impact,
no conversation on the topic would be complete without a discussion of it. In fact, after Bro-
cious exposed this issue at the Black Hat security conference in July 2012, hotels experienced
actual cases of intruders abusing this flaw to enter hotel rooms and steal property. Brocious’s
work is popular in the information security community because it abuses basic security
design flaws, so it is a perfect place to begin understanding security issues surrounding elec-
tronic door locks.
THE ONITY DOOR LOCK
The Onity HT door lock is extremely popular. If you’ve stayed at hotels, you’ve likely encoun-
tered it and implicitly relied upon its mechanisms for your safety and privacy. As shown in
Figure 2-1, the Onity lock consists of a magnetic key card reader. Hotel guests are issued mag-
netic key cards, which open the locks when swiped through the readers. Hotel employees can
issue these cards to guests upon check-in or when a guest requests an additional card. The
hotels can issue master keys to employees, such as housecleaning staff, that can open multi-
ple doors.
Though the Onity lock employs a traditional mechanism of using magnetic cards as keys,
it is important to study, because the next generation of IoT-based door locks is likely to
employ a hybrid approach that preserves traditional mechanisms (physical keys and magnetic-
stripe cards) and employs smarter methods such as wireless authentication and electronic
keys, which we will study in the following sections of this chapter. Security issues surround-
ing the Onity lock are also important to understand because they lay the foundation for under-
standing fundamental security design flaws that can potentially be exploited to impact mil-
lions of locks deployed worldwide. We must strive to prevent such scenarios in the future.
CHAPTER 2: ELECTRONIC LOCK PICKING—ABUSING DOOR LOCKS TO COMPROMISE(^38) PHYSICAL SECURITY