PIN-Punching Robot Can Crack Your Phone’s Security Code In Less Than 24 Hours

PIN-Punching Robot Can Crack Your Phone’s Security Code In Less Than 24 Hours: There’s nothing particularly difficult about cracking a smartphone’s four-digit PIN code. All it takes is a pair of thumbs and enough persistence to try all 10,000 combinations. But hackers hoping to save time and avoid arthritis now have a more efficient option: Let a cheap, 3D-printable robot take care of the manual labor.

At the Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas early next month, security researchers Justin Engler and Paul Vines plan to show off the R2B2, or Robotic Reconfigurable Button Basher, a piece of hardware they built for around $200 that can automatically punch PIN numbers at a rate of about one four-digit guess per second, fast enough to crack a typical Android phone’s lock screen in 20 hours or less.