PIN-Cracking Robot To Be Showed Off At Defcon

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "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. Engler and Vines built their bot, shown briefly in a preview video, from three $10 servomotors, a plastic stylus, an open-source Arduino microcontroller, a collection of plastic parts 3D-printed on their local hackerspace's Makerbot 3D printer, and a five dollar webcam that watches the phone's screen to detect if it's successfully guessed the password. The device can be controlled via USB, connecting to a Mac or Windows PC that runs a simple code-cracking program. The researchers plan to release both the free software and the blueprints for their 3D-printable parts at the time of their Def Con talk."

Update in the next android

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The screen would be locked out after every failed unlock attempt for the duration of t millisecons, t = 1 * 2^(n) , where n = nth consecutive failed unlock attempt. My quick calculation shows the 50th unlock attempt would take 35000 years. The tenth unlock attempt would take 1 sec. Ravi S