Is this just a movie thing or can it actually be done with certain types of safes? What would a person be listening for?
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Imagine inside the lock three discs or wheels stacked in a cylinder. Each disc has a notch cut out in a random place, corresponding to a number on the exterior dial. The lock works by spinning each disc until a lever arm can drop into all three notches. If you can listen closely, you can hear the sounds on the wheels spinning, and if you can listen *really* closely, you can hear the difference between three wheels scraping against the lever arm versus two wheels – indicating where a notch would be. So basically you end up doing a sound analysis, plotting the numbers where you think you heard two wheels scraping.
As for the real world, well, this kind of attack has been known for decades, so unless it’s a dirt cheap lock, most safes will either have mitigations against it, or use a different mechanism.
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