Numerous gun safes can be opened by a kid using a straw or paper clip.

Las Vegas, NV. - Is a plastic drinking straw from McDonald’s the only thing keeping a thief — or worse, a child — from accessing the loaded weapon in your closet safe?

That’s apparently the case with one model of personal safes that a team of researchers will be cracking at DefCon on Friday.

But the researchers found similar problems with several brands of personal safes that are marketed for securing guns and other valuables. Toby Bluzmanis, Marc Weber Tobias, and Matt Fiddler demonstrated in videos that they were able to swiftly open seven models of safes, using household items like paper clips, a wire hanger and a drinking straw. In one case, they opened a safe simply by lightly bouncing it on a floor once.

It’s estimated that about a fifth of all households own a handgun, according to a study by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. About 500 teens and children are killed accidentally each year with guns, some of them by handguns stored in their homes.

The safes the researchers looked at are sold at Walmart and sporting good stores and Amazon.com. Many of them are certified as being compliant with California penal code standards for securing firearms. But Tobias notes in one of the videos that the companies that make the safes “do not understand security engineering,” and that “every one of these safes should be pulled from the market until they’re fixed … before someone else gets hurt or killed.”

The researchers began examining the safes six months ago after Tobias was contacted by a former detective named Ed Owens from the Clark County Sheriff’s office in Vancouver, Washington. Owens’s 3-year-old son was accidentally shot to death in September 2010 after his 11-year-old step-sister retrieved the detective’s loaded handgun from a Stack-On safe in which it had been stored.

Stack-On safes had been issued to all deputies in the sheriff’s department to secure service revolvers at home after a previous shooting incident in 2003 in which another child was killed with a deputy’s gun. Owens asserted that the safe his employers gave him was not working properly, and that the sheriff’s department knew this before the shooting occurred but did not recall the safes. The sheriff’s department accused Owens of failing to report the malfunctioning safe.

In 2004, Stack-On had recalled 1,320 of the model of safes that was purchased by the sheriff’s department, because the safes could be opened by simply jiggling the doorknob, though the sheriff’s department maintains that the recalled safes were not from the same lot number as the ones the law enforcement agency bought.

In either case, the researchers were called in to test the model of safe connected with the shooting, and found that a magnetic pin that moves up and down when someone enters the correct combination was superfluous. They could simply move the pin by bouncing the safe, causing the door to swing open. In a video the researchers made showing the vulnerability, a 3-year-old boy lifted the safe a couple of inches off the floor and set it down, causing the door to spring open.

“This is what happens when you have a defective design,” Tobias says. “The sheriff’s department didn’t have a clue what they were buying and didn’t know how to evaluate them.”

The researchers decided to test six other models of safe to see if they had similar problems.

They tested four models of safes made by Stack-On, a leading seller based in Illinois, and others made by Bulldog, GunVault and Amsec. All of them were easily opened. Some of them could be opened in ways that were undetectable, so that anyone just looking at the safe afterward would never know that it had been opened and its contents removed. Some of the safes are used by the TSA to store papers and evidence at airports.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/07/gun-safes/