Assets and Security Goals:

• The safety of attendees.  The guest lists of these events contains lots of famous names that could be the target of attacks  on their personal safety.
• The timeliness of the event.  These events are usually televised live, with lots of advertising revenue depending on the event showing on time.  Failing to do so would cause significant losses to many parties involved.
• The exclusivity of the event.  Failing to prevent the general public form obtaining access to the even would dilute the exclusivity and mysticism of the even, making the event feel less important overall

Potential Adversaries:

• Personal enemies.  The guests are often famous, meaning they’ve made a name for themselves, generally meaning they’ve also made a few enemies, who may want to harm them.
• Paparazzi.  These pseudo journalists will do anything to capture or make a story about some celebrity, often at the epense of that person’s reputation and possibly safety.
• Overzealous fans.  These fans can go overboard in their attempts to meet the Hollywood star in question, possibly causing safety issues for that person.

Weaknesses:

• Given the large guest lists generally include many lesser-known celebrities and their entourage, security personnel generally don’t know everyone on the guest list, so it’s possible to impersonate one of these people given the right fake credentials.
• While electronic keycards are common, there is quite often an entrance without the capability to verify these that’s used by service personnel, making the system trivial to bypass.
• As always, the human element applies, in that if a person acts like they belong at the event, no one tends to question that fact, once they’re inside.  Moreover, Weiss has found that security personnel will often back down from asking question is you claim to be in a hurry, not wanting to make themselves a target of the guests anger.

Potential Defenses:

• The electronic keycard system could be expanded to be at every entrance, making passes much more difficult to duplicate.
• Better training and protection from retribution for security personnel could help prevent the specific human weaknesses exploited by Weiss and company.

In conclusion, while the parties are generally secure from a large scale perspective, becoming totally secure for such a large even will be extremely difficult and possibly be at the cost of usability of the system.  The celebrities generally don’t want to be bothered with security, so the system will likely have backdoors built in to allow them easy access in, which could make any of these upgrades moot anyways.

Assets/Security Goals

• The money in the checks
• The personal information and signatures on the checks

Adversaries

• Non residents interested in stealing money or identity
• Residents interested in the same
• Residents interested in forcing neighbors into late fees or the like

Weaknesses

• The checks are left in the box often for days. This means there is a significant amount of time during which the box can be compromised without anyone noticing.
• Common areas are accessible not only by residents, but quite easily by non-residents: guests, or strangers who follow a resident through the main door.
• The key lock is often a very weak lock which is easily picked or broken.
• The box itself is often cheap a flimsy or is fastened together with regular screws. Using a screw driver in the easiest case, or to the extreme a crow bar or brute force.

Potential Defenses/Conclusion
There are several solutions which could alleviate to a large extent these security risks. An overriding weakness of these solutions is that they are relatively expensive compared to the cheap cost of existing drop boxes and the biggest stake holders (the residents paying rent) are not in charge of choosing the solution (the building managers). Nevertheless, I will discuss some possible solutions. There are two basic levels of the solution. Limiting access to the box: general complex security measures like double door entrances, keys on more doors before getting to the drop-box area and the like, as well as only leaving checks out for a shorter period of time (perhaps collecting several times a day during payment periods. Making the drop box more secure: stronger boxes and locks would prevent access to the checks. Moreover, other methods such as direct delivery (in person) to the managers would eliminate most of these vulnerabilities. These solutions either compromise convenience (for example delivering directly to manager means that more coordination is required) or money (for example more expensive boxes or locks).

Potential Adversaries/Threats:
- Employees: Most employees have access to anywhere in the building and a few have keys to enter any apartment. An employee could willingly, or unwillingly, provide a gateway into someone’s apartment.
- Malicious people: There is always the possibility of someone wanting to harm someone else or steal someone’s belongings. Having access to someone’s home allows the possibility for either event to occur.
- Former Residents: Since the same key is used to access the building, a resident could try to duplicate the key. This might allow the person to have access to the building after he or she leaves.

Potential Weaknesses:
- RFID Access: The garage, elevators, and outside doors all use an RFID reader to access the building from outside. The weaknesses of RFID also apply as someone could try to create an access key into the building by first reading someone else’s key.
- Residents: It is possible to access the building by following a resident. Someone could enter the garage right after someone else opened it or enter the elevator right after someone used his or her key.

Potential Defenses:

The main defense is controlling who has access into the building. As mentioned above, outside doors, the garage, and the evaluator require an access key. Although the access method has its own weaknesses, it still provides some protection against unwanted guests from entering.

Another method of controlling access is locking the staircase in one direction. The doors to the staircase remain unlocked, but the doors from inside the staircase are lock. This prevents people, even residents, from accessing the building from the stairwell.

There are security cameras at every floor. Although these cameras are unlikely to prevent anything bad from happening, they can be used to detect and recover from an attack.

Evaluation of Risks

Although piggybacking on another resident’s access into the building is possible, it does have its limitations. Each key access only allows one floor button to be pushed. If someone was strictly relying on someone else’s key, he or she would be limited to the same floor. Also with the one-way staircase access, that person would not be able to use the stairs to change floors.

Although this one-way access does provide an added security feature, like in the case above, it can also provide inconvenience. Since the stairways only have a one-way access, the elevator is the only way to access the residential floors. This restriction allows for a denial of service attack. If the elevators were ever disabled, residents would not be able to access their apartments without removing the security of a locked stairwell.

Conclusion

There are flaws in RFID, but why go through the trouble of breaking the restricted access mechanism when a social engineering attack is easier. There have been many times when I’ve entered the elevator with someone else inside, noticed my floor was already pushed, and never had to take out my key. Of course no one will ask “Hey, do you live here? Can I see your key?” In the end having access require keycards or some other type of technology doesn’t really matter if someone else opens the door.

One of the interesting topics brought up by Microsoft Research India during their Change talk last week was that of mobile banking in the developing world. Managing and distributing money can be a tricky proposition in the developing world – often, people end up entrusting their money to drivers to transfer around the city or country.

Mobile banking through cell phones has proven to be an extremely cost-effective way to avoid these kinds of headaches. Through both downloadable software and text message interfaces, it is possible to efficiently transfer and manage money without the existence of local branches to handle the transaction, with minimal fees and far less obvious physical risk. However, this method has resulted in its own set of idiosyncrasies that would not likely exist with similar systems elsewhere.

Afraid of doing something wrong, many people in these developing areas are reluctant to actually carry out their own banking. Thus, a whole class of middlemen have arisen specifically for mobile banking. People will bring their mobile phones into these middlemen’s stores and tell the store owners what they want done, and the middlemen will then go do it for them. This interesting use case leads to quite a few security implications.

Assets and Security Goals

• Customers’ money is of course important. The reasons should be fairly obvious – we of course want to protect it from being stolen.
• Customers’ financial records are also important – financial histories are private, with some exceptions, and they should stay that way. Knowing how much money someone has may put them at risk for a real-life robbery, for instance, or knowing their stock portfolio could cause other problems.

Adversaries and Threats

• Malicious third parties who would like to steal the customers’ money, perhaps by listening to the airwaves, or physically stealing the phone. A lot can be done with just a few seconds with a phone given a text messaging interface.
• The middlemen have an extraordinary amount of power given what they have been entrusted with by the end-users. And, since their clients won’t have it any other way, banks have been forced to actually work with these middlemen, including them in the system. A store owner could easily pull off an “Office Space” type scheme, stealing miniscule amounts of money from each customer.

Potential Weaknesses

• Snooping on peoples’ wireless connections is difficult since the network provides some level of intrinsic security. We’re not experts on this subject, so it’s difficult for us to assess how feasible this approach is in reality.
• Replay attacks are possible, especially if any actions are carried out via text message, and a malicious user manages to take over the phone physically, or duplicate/forge the SIM card.
• Physical access is an imminent problem given the prevalence of these middlemen in transactions. Somehow, even with physical access by users other than the clients there needs to be security and accountability.

Potential Defenses

• For snooping, simply use any of the well-established encryption protocols we discussed this quarter.
• Replay attacks can be guarded against by confirming each action with a code that can only be used once.
• The physical access problem is the most difficult problem to address – and the most interesting. Since third parties are allowed access to the system by the clients, it is difficult to enforce anything in the system if the third party is malicious. One way to defend against third party mischief would be to not carry any actions out immediately, but instead to queue them and then confirm them via text message with the client an indeterminate amount of time in the future, on the order of several hours. This way, hopefully clients will be forced to examine and acknowledge all actions away from the influence of the store owners. Malicious middlemen could counter this by requesting to keep the phone until the transaction is complete, but hopefully clients would grow suspicious of this request before long.

Mobile banking is something that hasn’t quite caught on here like it has in other places of the world. Not only is it useful for banking when branches aren’t nearby, the service has in some places, like Japan, evolved to include payments via cell phone rather than credit card, and other technology-enabled services which have security implications. Ultimately, a lot of these problems are already being worked on in the context of their low-tech equivalents (eg transmitting credit card information, etc), but as we can see with the rural banking case study, there can be a lot of unexpected usages which result in unexpected potential problems.

These unexpected issues are likely where we will see the most interesting security issues in the future.

Clint Tseng and Erik Turnquist

• Assets

1. The wearer of this device should be able to restrict access to the data he/she collects.  This is important to protect not only the privacy, but potentially the security of the user.
2. Others in contact with the wearer should have their own privacy concerns, given  they may or may not know they are being filmed and that the footage could even be streamed online in real time.

• Adversaries

1. An adversary may wish to steal private footage the user is filming.  The architect of this system is a filmmaker, so the footage could have potential value as an art-form.  One could easily imagine several other scenarios, however, where the images being filmed are of a sensitive nature.  Video of a user typing in his or her password onto a bank’s website, or entering his or her pin number into an ATM machine could be quite valuable to an attacker.
2. An adversary could also use footage to cause direct harm to the user.  If the user decides to stream the video footage he or she collects online, an attacker could use this information to find the person’s precise location, and cause physical harm.

• Weaknesses

1. The footage has to be wirelessly transmitted from the camera to another location where it is collected.  This stream could potentially be sniffed and/or corrupted in flight.
2. Rather than attack the footage in transit, an adversary could break into the remote location where the data is stored and steal and/or corrupt the hard-disk on which the data is stored.

• Defenses

1. The stream could be encrypted and signed to prevent tamering with, however this presents a large problem given the size/weight restrictions of the device within the eye-socket.  Most likely the camera within the eye would have to operate with an extremely weak signal that only could be received by another component on the users body.  That larger component, located on a belt or backpack, could be responsible for encrypting the stream, and sending it larger distances.  This current plan uses this implementation, for space not security reasons, but it may not include the encryption step.
2. The user should also be careful to physically secure the remote machine location (locking doors and what-not), as well as encrypting the hard drive.

While to this point I have focused mainly on issues regarding tampering or theft of the data-stream, the elephant in the room remains the larger privacy issue surronding hidden cameras prevading our daily lives.  If this camera becomes so life-like as to be indisguishable from an actual eye, a possibility all the more likely give Moore’s law, a conversation one might think is private could be stored and transmitted to millions.  One could argue users of this system should be ethically obligated to inform others they are wearing a camera, however others might claim having a prosthetic eye is a physical handicap, and the privacy of that condition should be protected.  Spence himself claims he will turn the device off on private occasions, but why should he be trusted, and how can that trust be enforced?

To those who fear a world of eye-spies filming their every movement, my response would be that hidden cameras are by no means new.  Making a camera look as real as a human eye may be a large step forward, but eye-implants or no eye-implants, if people fervently care about keeping their private lives private they should tread lightly in public places.

Article:  http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/eye-spy-filmmak.html

Community gate openers and garage door openers are, by their very design, long-range communication devices. If the signal the opener emits cannot be detected a good distance away, the devuce is not doing its job. Therefore, it follows that the HomeLink device could record garage door opener signals while passing by a car that is using a garage door opener. With access to many types of garage doors after being in the proximity of the door opening, a world of possibilities opens up.

Assets / Security Goals
- Gated communities. Many high-rent communities are protected by outside gates that, in theory, prevent any unauthorized people from even getting close to the homes in the communities. Although gates can be bypassed, for example by tailgating in, this requires a witness.
- Garage doors. Garage doors are ubiquitous throughout Americana. Opening them often leads to the nicest cars a family owns, unlocked interior doors, and many expensive shop tools and other items.
- Home automation systems. These systems can turn on and off music, lights, and other household appliances. Controlling advanced home automation systems can give someone — legitimate or otherwise — nearly full control over the systems inside of a house.
- Home and family security. A home is a trusted place where people and their belongings are thought to be generally safe and secure.

Potential Adversaries / Threats
- Burglars / Larceny. An obvious threat is being robbed. The HomeLink system can be used to gain access to garages, which often house expensive items, and often include unlocked doors to the interior of the rest of the house.
- Kidnappers / Hostage taking. In addition to being robbed, people within the home may be taken hostage or kidnapped.
- Home automation denial of service / attack. An attacker could prevent control or gain control of a home automation system, causing it to be unusable or go haywire, or activate unwanted systems (such as very loud music), or deactivate wanted systems (such as lights).

Potential Weaknesses
- Universal transceiver with insider knowledge of encrypted protocols. The Homelink system advertises that due to their relationships with manufacturers, the HomeLink device can be programmed with “encrypted” garage door systems. This makes it an attractive tool to use for a potential attacker of these types of systems.
- Necessarily a long-range device where the attacker does not have to be visible. As discussed in the introduction, these devices by their very nature are long distance. The attacker could record an open signal while driving by, or while hidden in a nearby place (behind bushes, around a corner, etc).

Potential Defenses
- Use an unsupported system (may become supported in future)
While using a system that is not supported by HomeLink works for the present, HomeLink will likely support more systems in the future, as this increases their potential customer base.
- Require second authentication factor (HomeLink may support both already, or may change to support both)
Going along with the idea of defense in depth, requiring a second authentication factor (ie, a PIN number) may increase security. However, depending on the sophistication of the original device and of HomeLink’s system, even this may not be sufficient.
- Design system with only limited trust (ie, lock door inside garage)
Trusting anyone who can gain access to the gated community or your garage is probably not the best security solution. Instead, trust such people only with access to the garage, and place additional security measures to prevent access to more sensitive/private parts of the home. This is once again defense in depth.

Evaluation of Risks

The risks associated with this technology are quite serious. In fact, they are very different from typical risks of other technologies. In regard to privacy and security in the general technology product sense, a successful breach often means an adversary can gain personal information about the victim or can deny them correct service from some sort of device. A security breach with the HomeLink typically means an adversary has free access to the victim’s residence, and their physical well-being is jeopardized. This is (arguably) the most important asset to any human being. This puts the risks of this technology in the highest category, and it’s quite clear that the accompanying defenses are not up to par with the seriousness of these risks.

Another factor dramatically increasing the risks with this technology is the ease of which the above-described attacks could be mounted. Again, speaking comparatively to other technologies, an attacker almost always is limited to someone with a high level of expertise in some part of the field of computing. With the HomeLink, virtually anybody would be able to use it to gain access to a victim’s physical premises. Increasing the pool of people with the ability to launch an attack inevitably increases the total number of attacks, and with the pool of able attackers being nearly the entire population, the assessed threats come with significantly higher associated risk.

One avenue of the vulnerability of the HomeLink that lowers the security risk is the way in which attacks must be carried out. When a security vulnerability is exploitable by computer experts working in the comfort of their living room (or their parents’ basement), the adversary has their own sense of security and anonymity. Also, they are typically attacking a nameless, faceless individual that they will never have to actually see. Attackers using the HomeLink to gain access to people’s homes put themselves in a great deal more exposure and risk, and in a situation many otherwise would-be attackers are not comfortable. This eliminates the attacker who has nothing better to do with their computer and is simply bored. Unfortunately, this also means that the attacks that are launched are deliberate and well thought-through, and are most likely of the very dangerous variety. In a sense, the attacks using the HomeLink are likely to come from the least ethical people, lowering the number of potential attackers, but increasing the risk of the attack being more malicious.

Conclusion

In summary, the HomeLink is a potentially dangerous device. It is a seemingly innocuous piece of technology, but the risks associated with its assets are of the highest magnitude. Nothing is more important for a product to protect than personal physical safety, and the HomeLink can be used to directly jeopardize victims’ well-being.  What’s more, this device poses a threat to the privacy and security of users who don’t own it and don’t use it. Without using the defenses described above, every person with an automatic garage door or gate is vulnerable just because of the existence of the HomeLink. The set of people with the ability to use the device maliciously is extraordinarily large, as is the set of potential victims. These potential threats and vulnerabilities are something the manufacturer will hopefully take into serious consideration.

Experts at Kessler International purchased 100 hard drives from eBay over a six month period, and 40 of those hundred contained data that could be recovered either by using forensic software or by simply plugging in the drive. Financial information and emails composed over 50% of the data they discovered, but they also found identifying information for many of the hard drives’ previous owners. They even stumbled upon a juicy cache of information that fueled a previous owner’s foot fetish.

The article then provides a few examples of known incidents where private corporate data has shown up on hard drives sold on eBay.

This sort of thing happens because people don’t know what they’re doing. So: how can you prevent other people from recovering your data, should they happen to acquire one of your old hard drives? Well, there are two ways really. You could keep all of the hard drives you ever use. Or, before you send your old hard drives away, you could be sure to use a DoD-grade piece of software or hardware (the recommended techniques are overwriting and degaussing) to remove all of the evidence that you once had a thing for people popping bubble wrap with their teeth while covered in chocolate syrup. You could also use full-disk encryption, if you want to challenge those who would access your data. But really it’s best to just completely obfuscate and obliterate anything that was once there with that DoD-grade sanitizer.

No one but owners of the data can prevent unwanted data recovery, and only then by acting before it goes out into the free market. Ebay can’t do anything about it, nor should they. It isn’t eBay’s job to monitor all the used junk vendors sell that could harm the original owners if those owners didn’t take the necessary precautions. That said, I’m surprised that company data ends up as part of the information found. Companies really should know better, and should already be employing the preventative techniques above.

Wait, what am I saying? No they shouldn’t. I’m opening eBay even as I type this. Hmm, I wonder what the chances are of finding a pre-release version of the next big Adobe product on one of these.

Assets and Security Goal:

• Assets: Players’ chips. The goal of the game is to make as much money as you can or be the last one left at the table by taking everyone else’s money.
• Security Goal: Protect your own chips at all cost! You basically don’t want others to cheat and take your chips with an unfair advantage.

Adversaries and Threats:

• Other players: They are your main threat since they are the one in the game trying to take all your chips away.
• Bystanders: They may potentially be helping out players at the table, such as leaking information about other players’ cards.

Weaknesses:

• Counterfeit the chips. If the chips don’t have any security features (e.g. watermark-like markings, a system keeping track of individual chips, etc.), then it is easy to BYOC (Bring Your Own Chips). This is very hard to pull off at a casino however, but you are more likely to succeed at a friend’s house playing a “friendly” game of poker. You can either buy the same chips used in the game, or you can try manufacturing them on your own.
• Marking the cards. You can try to mark the cards so that others don’t notice the marks, but you can identify them easily. This can help you tell what cards your opponents have in order to help you win. For instance, you can dent different parts of the card, or you can use the pattern on the back of the card as a camouflage for your markings so that you have to intentionally look at certain parts of the pattern in order to notice the difference.
• Sleight of hand. Some people can shuffle the deck so that certain cards always appear, for example, on the bottom of the deck. When he’s dealing out cards, he can deal out the desired cards from the bottom of the deck to his partner, who is also another player at the table. They can then team up and split the winnings in the end. See the movie Rounders for more info.
• Shoulder surfing. The difficulty of pulling this off depends on the size and shape of the table, how the players are seated, and how the players look at their cards. Most of the time it’s very hard to shoulder surf, but sometimes new players look at their cards by exposing the entire surface of the cards, giving others an opportunity to read the cards. Like I mentioned above, shoulder surfing can also be done using a bystander or a spy camera.

Defenses:

• Other players. This is the main defense all poker games use. Since the players are playing against each other, they would look out for themselves and make sure others don’t cheat.
• Security Guards. In some casinos, security guards act like a threat to cheaters in which the cheaters may be beaten up if they get caught. The cheaters will have to re-evaluate the cost and benefit before cheating.
• Guns. Bringing an unconcealed gun to a game of poker is similar to using security guards in the sense of instilling fear in cheaters, but guns are more threatening than security guards.
• RFID chips. Use RFID to keep track of the chips. When the players cash in the chips, the casino can check whether the chips belong to the casino.
• Raised table edges. This increases the difficulty to shoulder surf as the shoulder surfer has to be at the same angle as the player in order to read the cards.
• No space to stand behind players. This can be a small room in which each player’s back is close to the wall so that there is no space for shoulder surfers to stand behind the players.

Risks:
The risk of being cheated is losing money or the potential to lose money. Depending on the type of cheating, the amount of money lost can vary significantly. For instance, shoulder surfing gives you an advantage of knowing your opponents’ cards, but you still have to play the game to win the money. On the other hand, being able to counterfeit chips and cash in the chips successfully, it’s a direct monetary gain depending on the amount you counterfeit.
The risks of cheating are also high. If you are playing at a friend’s house and get caught for cheating, you are probably going to be disqualified in the game and lose your friends’ and other players’ trust. If you are playing at a casino, especially in Vegas, the consequences may be more than just getting disqualified and losing all of your money.
The ethics of cheating in a game of poker can vary. Some people think it’s completely unethical. Others may think gambling is a vice, and vice against vice isn’t so bad. There are online poker games now in which you can play for either fake or real money. It eliminates some weaknesses (e.g. shoulder surfing) but introduces other weaknesses (e.g. hacking).

Conclusion:
Cheating in a game of poker can sometimes be a lot easier than hacking into a corporate server. Even though it doesn’t require too much knowledge to cheat, how it’s executed is very important if you don’t want to get caught. This means that almost everyone can cheat, but being able to pull it off requires a lot of practice and careless opponents. Unlike breaking through the airport security to plant a bomb on a plane, it’s still possible for you to win the game without cheating at all, so cheating is not necessary to achieve your goal but can help you to achieve it. I play poker for fun. Winning is good, and I wouldn’t feel bad if I lose. Cheating, however, just makes the game not fun anymore.

• taking inventory of my files?
• figuring out who I am and tracking me?
• installing autorun software (like a virus) onto my device?
• copying my contacts, my email, my cell phone pictures, my mp3s, etc?
• <your idea here>?

I don’t know whether this particular power stand does anything more complicated than supplying power and ground to the right two pins, and I suppose that by paying attention (to the screen on a cell phone or the lights on an iPod shuffle) you might be able to tell if serial communication were initiated and something fishy was going on. But that doesn’t provide much comfort; in the end what we need is a good way for portable devices to verify the authenticity of the device to which they connect.

Since the days of waking up at 5am to watch the Tour de France live with my dad at eight years old, I’ve been a big fan of bikes. I’ve since grown to love riding them, and spent several years as an avid road racer. While I’m somewhat of an anomaly, many of you also rely on cycling for transportation to class, to work, and elsewhere. Unlike cars, which are just slightly harder to steal, bikes are the candy-from-a-baby in the world of theft. One magazine article I read several years ago had a “professional bike thief” (probably a security professional who learned methods of theft in his research) attempt to steal a bike secured by one each of every available bike lock on the market at the time. In public. The result? All but a single lock could be circumvented so quickly that nobody in the area even noticed that it was not unlocked by normal means.

I have to say, I am particularly bitter about bike security. A few years ago I was living in Stevens Court with a few friends. A past summer job at Gregg’s Greenlake Cycles had yielded an absurdly cheap employee purchase of a Lemond Tourmalet, a very nice road bike. I wasn’t using it to commute to school (who locks up a bike like that around the Ave?), but I did have it in our apartment so I could go riding. One day I came home and it had been stolen from my living room. My roommates had left the front windows wide open and the door unlocked. Go go speed racer, go.

Ahem…anectodes. So back to bike locks. Here’s the breakdown:
Assets:

• The bike: This one is fairly straightforward. The main asset is the bike itself.
• The value of the bike, either monetary or functional.

Adversaries/Threats:

• Many bike thefts are crimes of opportunity. Often, adversaries are not hardened criminals, but those taking advantage of an easy gain.
• Scalpers are the most common pre-meditated bike thiefs. They steal bikes for resale of the bike or its parts. Especially on more expensive bikes, the parts are, separately, worth more than the bike as a complete product. A 10-speed Shimano Dura-Ace component set (just shift levers, gears, chain, brakes, and derailleurs) could run almost $1,500. A pair of good Ksyrsium road wheels (not tires, just the wheels) can cost $1,100.
• Generic thiefs.

Potential Weaknesses:
Bikes are incredibly difficult to secure. Part of this has to do with the way they are built. Each bike component is just screwed or bolted on. Bikes need to be light and mobile so emphasis is not on security. Often security is a non-consideration. Moreover, due to the common use cases (transportation, recreation, or racing), it is impractical to transport heavy-duty security mechanisms along with the bike.

• Parts are not well-secured. They can be removed quickly and easily with conventional tools.
• With the exception of the frame, most components are either plastic, carbon, or very lightweight metal alloys that can be snapped or cut with hands or the most basic of implements.
• Because the various components all come apart, it is impossible to secure all of the securable and valuable parts of the bike without multiple locks.
• Most locks are just for show. Cable locks can be cut with wire or bolt cutters. Chains can be dealt with using bolt cutters of varying strengths. Hacksaws can cut most any cable, chain, or lock bolt, since all but the most expensive locks use cheap, unhardened, and generally low-quality steel. Finally, many of the locks themselves are insecure. Keyed locks are often easy to pick. Circular locks were shown crackable with a mere ball-point.
• People don’t bother. Many bikes are left unsecured, especially if the owner anticipates a short stop.
• Human error causes locking to fail. Many fail to grasp the detachability of the various bike components or underestimate the time it would take for a good thief to disassemble impeding components. You’ll see many lone wheels still locked to racks, or a frame by itself without any wheels, the fork and drivetrain stripped.

Potential Defenses:

• The greatest defense for a bike locked in public is to not be worth stealing. Nobody will ever waste their time trying to jack a cheap, old, or poorly maintained bike. If you’re commuting, especially in sketchy parts of time (*cough* the ave *cough*), don’t do it with a $2,500 road bike. Get yourself a used bike at a garage sale and ride that. If you are going to ride a nice bike, obfuscate it. Paint it over with an ugly color and bad paint job. Scratch it up. Plaster it with stickers. Get it dirty. None of these will work spectacularly well, but it never hurts.
• By a GOOD lock. This is especially true if you don’t heed the advice above. I would have no problem spending $100 on a bike lock for a nice bike. The very best bike lock out there will not stop a thief, but the best lock used correctly may impede them enough that they are deterred in a given context. So what is a good lock? Usually the way to go is either a good U-lock or fat, FAT chain and lock. If you actually care, I would recommend either the Kryptonite New York Fahgettaboudit Chain (https://www.kryptonitelock.com/products/ProductDetail.aspx?cid=1001&scid=1002&pid=1168) or U-Lock (https://www.kryptonitelock.com/products/ProductDetail.aspx?cid=1001&scid=1000&pid=1095). If you do get a U-lock, make sure it’s brand new and doesn’t have a tubular lock (the kind that gets insta-picked with a pen).
• Lock the bike properly. The frame MUST be locked to a secure beam. Ideally, you want to lock the frame, back wheel, and front wheel. With a single good lock, however, this is impossible. I, personally, simply lock the back wheel and frame with a single lock (carrying two locks is far too impractical…but I may come back to find a missing front wheel one of these days).
• Don’t take a bike to a known sketchy area in the first place.

Conclusions:

The bottom line is that if a crew with a van and power tools wants your bike…it’s just going to go. Sorry. If a single good bike thief with hand tools wants your bike, there’s also a good chance it won’t be there when you come back. The good news is that by far, most thefts are NOT committed by experts, but rather by fools taking advantage of an opportunity that you’ve given them. Take your lock seriously, lock your bike properly, and hope for the best.