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Category: safes

Risk of Death: Stack-On Safes, Consumer Product Safety Commission

There are plenty of inexpensive safes out there that claim to safely store guns away from children and there are even more videos on Youtube explaining how to easily open these same safes. Anybody remotely interested in opening such safes has been aware for more than a decade that many of these safes are not suitable for safely keeping guns locked up. They do however protect people in places like Seattle and Los Angeles from being liable for crimes committed with their guns if they are stolen: these and other places legally require you to lock your firearms up.

The CSPC is taking notice of the entry level gunsafe market and has proclaimed that the biometric gun safes made by Stack-On are a risk of death due to the false positives that their biometric keypad may register: apparently the biometric keypad may open if a stranger including a child tries their fingerprint.

The CSPC recommends destroying the keypad and using a key to unlock the safe.

I have watched biometric locks proliferate. I hold my breath when installing such locks for customers. I tell them from the get-go that the biometric features may stop working or may not work very exclusively and unlock for people not even registered with the lock, and to definitely not call me expecting any kind of warranty from me if the lock stops working.

Inexpensive Chinese biometric doorknobs off of Amazon are one thing, but a 200 Ibs biometric safe failing is quite another. The first one can be mailed back to Amazon for a refund or simply thrown away if the customer decides to swallow their mistake and move on. The second will cost a lot of money to send anywhere. You will probably have to pay for a special truck with a lift gate to come pick it up. If you want to get rid of it yourself, you might be in for a surprise: the city dump might not accept safes. Back in the good old days they used to use asbestos for fireproofing material in safes and that can create a cancerous cloud of toxic dust if somebody with a bulldozer crushes a safe full of it. They also used to put tear gas cannisters in safe doors and nobody wants to get exposed to tear gas.

So it is a bit of a headache getting rid of old safes. (That might be why the magnet fishing channels on Youtube often recover safes near bridges over large rivers) If you are going to get a safe, spend a little extra. You don’t want to take chances on the thing because it is such an investment getting it to your location and then installing it. Many safe installers charge hundreds of dollars to come out and bolt a safe down into concrete floor or attach lag bolts into the floor studs.

If you really want to get a safe with biometric capabilities, you should probably get a container that will accept an aftermarket safe lock. That way if the biometric features fail you can always replace the lock with one that has more reliable biometric features or go back to an old school dial lock.

How safe are safes?

It isn’t often that news about safes and safe locks hits the mainstream. Recently it came out that Liberty Safe had provided a factory code to the FBI to open up a gun safe owned by one of the accused in the January 6th imbroglio.; not with a court order but with a search warrant. This is upsetting to people for two reasons, number one they didn’t know that there was any such thing as a factory override code and two because they think the manufacturer shouldn’t give out these codes, much less have a database of these codes.

Here is a photoshopped image attempting to conflate the Liberty Safe override scandal with the Bud Light endorsement of a trans activist and hoping for similar fallout to Budweiser losing huge amounts of money due to boycott.

Here’s possibly an upsetting fact for you: most safe manufacturers have factory installed override codes for their safes. I as a registered safe tech can call many of these manufacturers and for free or a small fee they will give me a factory unlock or reset code! Liberty Safe is not the only one maintaining and giving out codes to authorities with legal requests. It’s actually an industry standard! If you register your safe with the manufacturer they will probably give you such codes as well in your time of need. They have these not for the FBI but primarily for you when you get locked out.

Those of you with privacy concerns, dislike of government overreach, and also maybe those of you with illegal/quasilegal stuff in your safes may be asking yourselves what you can do to actually secure your safe from an evil locksmith or the FBI/ATF/whatever and the factory codes they can get from the safe lock manufacturer.

Following is information that, if you use it, will all be your own responsibility. I accept no responsibility for the consequences of anything you do. The following should be thought of only as a series of thought experiments.

The answer is that first, if your safe lock has these codes you should figure out how to erase them or buy an aftermarket safe lock and install it yourself and don’t register it. Then remove any identifying stickers from the safe keypad. These are used legitimately by people like me to open safes without any drilling. If you do so, it may void warranties and cost you more down the road if you lose the combination or there’s some glitch with an electronic safe lock. Be careful of what lock you get, a cheap one might be vulnerable to software developed that can open many electronic safe locks in minutes by bruteforcing the combination.

Better yet, if you want to be certain that nobody else can get into your safe buy a mechanical safe lock. There will only be one combination that you yourself can change. That of course doesn’t prevent automated safe dialers or people knowledgeable about how to do so from opening your safe. As an aside, mechanical safe locks are much more reliable than electronic ones. Despite lacking lots of the whiz-bang features of the battery powered ones, mechanical safe locks last for decades. Some are still going after a century. That just isn’t going to happen with the slapdash soldering and incomplete seals put over circuitboards in today’s manufacturing world. Something will fail. Even circuitboards made to go into space that are examined for every possible failure still fail sometimes. Lowest common denominator pricing guarantees that the failsafes demanded by the likes of NASA won’t make it to your safe lock which will likely fail in ten years or less depending on wear.

This fiasco has been a long time coming. Safe manufacturers have been playing with fire maintaining databases of key overrides. In the software industry we’ve seen time and again how social manipulation and network intrusion from hackers has yielded entire databases of customer credit card information before. How likely is it that safe manufacturers are using modern best practices to secure these override codes like salting, air gapping the computers with the database, etc? Or one rogue employee dipping his dirty mitts into the private database as seen with Twitter and Dreamhost in the past.

I have the ability to open safes without the override codes so it isn’t the end of the world for me if the safe manufacturers stop maintaining these databases. Of course it would make life harder and the customer would end up paying a lot more for an opening, but reading the fallout from this scandal it seems like there is a high demand for a safe manufacturer that doesn’t maintain a database of override codes. If you’re trying to lock the world out from your safe maybe you should demand that nobody can open the safe but you.

As long as you know about the factory overrides, people should make informed decisions about what they put in their safe based on what methods are available to open the safe.

Safes should just work

I got called out to fix a safe last week. Normally this wouldn’t be newsworthy but this time it was because I was the second safe technician to show up that day. The first one told the customer that they must continue hitting the safe door with a hammer to close it or get it open. They also said that the fix was to buy a new safe even though the problematic one was only a few months old.

The manager on duty told me that my help probably wasn’t necessary, somebody had already come by earlier who instructed them to just hit the safe door with a hammer to both open and close it but when I passed on what the previous tech told the customer, the NSP asked me to check the safe. Turns out the NSP told the last guy to cancel and called me instead, but the last guy came out anyway. I wonder what kind of silliness the last guy committed before?

So I go take a look at the safe and immediately see a small screw wedged into the frame, just where the door should go when closed! Surprise surprise, the safe worked like new without an obstruction.

I don’t know what the moral of the story is, I guess it is that there are people who think they know what they’re doing who actually don’t. It’s experiences like these that make me question what dentists and auto mechanics are telling me. Did I get a good one or a bad one?