Safes, security and photonics

I recently came up with a new way to cut into the large metal and concrete reinforced vaults and safes. However I never write about anything that would aid criminals or the enemies of my nation so I won't be talking about that idea. My method is better than a portable IR laser.

I will write about things that can hinder criminals, etc. In general by adding thin fibreglass or metal wire bands to the concrete would greatly increase the resistance to attack since it would jam or otherwise load the bears of cutting equipment. More over it would severally hinder chip removal which makes drilling or sawing much more difficult. Materials that don’t produce a good chip are extremely hard to drill or cut.

They add metal shavings to the concrete but the fibers especially if they happen to be zirconium (lots of adiabatic heating of the cutting surface) or halogen containing would be a very effective trick to hindering cutting. The concrete is already oxidized but the metal of the drill is reducing so heat and halogens would quickly destroy the cutting edge. Cutting torches would still be a problem but the smoke would be very toxic. For torches adding metal bits with gas bubbles would foul the torch slowing the cutting as would a layer of chemicals that have a high heat of activation and a very endothermic rxn especially if they made a nasty vapor when heated.

Moving on from there I began to think about other weaknesses of safes and vaults. The biggest weakness is the electro-mechanical combination lock. As long there are gears that turn, people can listen for the mechanism engaging. No matter what they are made of gears still make noise. For electronic systems they are subject to attack in many of the same ways computers are attacked as well as more traditional drilling/cutting attacks.

Photonics provides a means to make a lock nearly tamper proof. By making the dial connect to a series of light dumps, fiber optics and mirrors all driven by a switching photonics circuit the number of combinations would be so high that brute force attacks would be impractical. Since the light inside the fibers behind the door is less detectible than an electronic signal, getting the combination by RF eavesdropping would be impossible and you can't “hear” light so listening wouldn't work. I won't go into the exact way it would work (if you want to know email me, I would be happy to work with a company etc to get this up and running). The fibers carrying the light could be placed such that drilling or cutting would disable photonics preventing the door from being opened and even if the door is successfully drilled there is no way to tell what the correct light path is since it changes each time the dial spins.

If more security is required then the light and power source could be built into an external device which would be required for opening, in addition to the correct combination. By putting color and polarizing filters in unlocking path only the "dongle" with the right spectrum and polarization filter would work. Addition security features could be added like a Wheatstone bridge to control the unlocking relay or logical circuit that would control access time or otherwise reduce the risk in cases where social engineering or “other” methods are used to obtain the combination. With light based circuits security can enter a whole new realm.