Jon King

Jon King has been involved in the locksport community since 2006.
Like so many others, he found the MIT Guide to Lockpicking and has
been hooked ever since.  His background in computer security provides
a systems analysis view of locks that causes Jon to obsessively search
for and exploit vulnerabilities in them.  He is also serving
active-duty in the US Navy in the field of electronics.  Jon's primary
interest in locksport is in high-security research and advancing the
state of the art.  He attends events like Defcon, HOPE, various 2600
meetings, and meets with other locksporters and hackers.  Through
these interactions, it is clear that more in-person meets is the best
way to foster creativity and develop new techniques and tools for
defeating locks.

Jon is most well-known to the community for developing a tool called
the "Medecoder".  It allows the user to pick and decode the sidebar
component of most Medeco locks.  Although the design is simple and not
entirely new, its development inspired Medeco to recognize the
vulnerability and the locksport community as a whole.  This led to the
company fixing the design problem and resulted in more secure
cylinders coming from the factory.

Currently, Jon is examining several areas of lock security that could
be compromised with some teamwork and face-to-face meets.  He is
experimenting with: Using Wii remotes and dial indicators to measure
tolerance errors, machining unique tools, using key pieces as a
pin-and-cam decoder variant, gathering bitting clues from Bilock pin
shapes, and more.  He believes that organizations like Locksport
International can encourage this sort of research and simplify the
disclosure issues that accompany it.