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Hiding the Hacker Instinct: Or, No Oppressor Strategy Can Be More Successful Than Training the Oppressed to Oppress Himself/Herself

by Phineas Phreak | 1116 words

I want to say at the start that I do not plan to get horribly technical in this article. Really, the security components that gave rise to this topic were pretty simple. They were childlike even, though somewhat effective. However, my main point here is not to drool over what I found out while I was playing around. What I am concerned with is the fact that I felt I had to hide what I was doing.

At the law office where I worked at one point, there was a two-sided hallway where the elevators to our floor let off. The office was arranged in a ring around this double-sided hallway. Doors could close and lock at both sides, though one side was open to the reception area during business hours. Thus, during business hours, after you got off the elevator, you either proceeded through the open doorway to the reception area where you had to state your business to be admitted or you had to get through the locked door at the other side of the hallway. To get through the locked door, you either had to scan a prox card or announce yourself to the receptionist to get buzzed through. After hours, the door on the reception side of the hallway was locked as well.

Now, the story was different if you were coming from the office to the elevator hallway. Obviously, if you came from the reception side during business hours you just walked through the open doorway. However, if you were coming through a locked door, it unlocked just as you reached for the door.

This interested me. I understood that it was perceived to be more convenient to have the doors unlock when someone inside wanted out, but I was curious how this had been arranged. I'm sure the setup was not novel, but I was still curious. Was it a proximity sensor? Did the metal handle electromagnetically sense human touch on the inside handle? I wanted to know. I wanted to know how it worked.

I noticed that I heard a click anytime I approached one of the locked doors from the inside. One time when I was going through, I happened to look up and see a small white plastic box with something that looked like a sensor. Suddenly, it all made sense. Motion detectors. Motion detectors were mounted on the ceiling on the inside of each doorway, pointed to see someone inside the office approach the door on their way out into the elevator hallway. Quite simply, the detector detected motion and unlocked the door.

This revelation pleased me far more than it should have. It really was not that hard to discover, but it still made me happy that I figured it out. Of course, it also got me thinking. The doors, though much sturdier than my doors at home, were still designed to be ornamental rather than secure. Though they locked fairly securely, there were significant gaps underneath and between the doors. Aesthetically pleasing as that may be, it also looked easy for someone to insert an object from the elevator hallway, through the gap under or between the doors, into the office. I thought it might be fairly easy to do so and trip the motion detector. It would have been fun for me to do so as a different way to get in instead of using my prox card, but someone else could do so as well. Someone who wasn't supposed to be in my office.

Really, I should have said something to someone. The office had a lot of computer equipment that someone might have found worth stealing, to say nothing of confidential client information. It was just too easy to get in. However, I said nothing. Reflecting on what I had been thinking, I further thought it would be bad for me if my firm knew that I thought in this way. I decided it would even be potentially dangerous for me to test my theory, under the possibility that someone might see me and know what I had been thinking. As a result, I stayed quiet and the flaw stayed in place.

However, I found out that I was not the only one. By chance, I learned that a coworker