Medeco Embraces The Locksport Community
Two days ago, Marc Weber Tobias pointed out [link to http://www.thesidebar.org/insecurity/?p=145 no longer works] that Medeco, the 800 pound gorilla in the high-security lock market, recently published an open letter to the locksport community, welcoming it to the physical security industry:
While we have worked with many locksmiths and security specialists in the past to improve our
cylinders, this is the first time that we have worked with people in the sport-lock picking community.
I am pleased to know that you have as much concern for the security of the public as those of us in
the lock industry. Again, I welcome you as representatives of the sport-lock picking community, to
the lock industry, and hope that together we can continue to improve the security and safety that
locks provide to the world.
This is really exciting. For the past few years, I’ve watched as Matt Blaze [link to http://www.crypto.com/photos/locks.html no longer works] and others applied information security principles to physical security and the resulting kerfuffles that so closely resembled the disclosure debates in our own space over the last ten years. As a result, it’s particularly exciting to see stuff like this coming from the physical security space.
Marc Weber Tobias has a great analysis [http://www.thesidebar.org/insecurity/?p=145 no longer works] of this letter as well as a very worthwhile discussion of ethics. Do go read it. The parallels between this and our own industry are very revealing…
As someone who is a (big) amateur in the community, I’m happy to see vendors are working with those who actively test their products. Obviously we’ve had this (for the most part) in the computer security market for years, and I think it has worked well at improving security at some level.
Thanks for spreading the word:-) This is a very exciting time for myself and the locksport world. I’m giving a talk about the tool and the experience at both the HOPE and the Defcon conferences.