Imagine rows of people hunched over soldering irons, carefully crafting systems designed to hack wireless devices and networks. Welcome to Defcon 23, a mash-up of talks, small vendor displays and hands-on hacking challenges/competitions dedicated to all things security—and how to break through it.

While browsing through booths of physical hacking paraphernalia, I ran across lock-picking tools from Toool. Scattered across the table were lock-picking sets as well as heaps of sample locks, so you could refine your technique.

Picking analog locks is a lot of fun, but I would have expected to see more digital hacking tools, for electronic door locks for example. At AVG we’ve been studying how physical security systems are evolving to become more digital and the security challenges that emerge from this evolution.

Your home door lock will become digital soon (here are some examples), and those skilled with wireless hacking will replace those with lock-picking expertise. Your digital lock will have more functionality than your old analog one. For example, it will probably have a camera, and allow you to let the plumber in even though you are at the office.  It is easy to imagine the incremental security concerns that this opens up. While it may take years for this to occur, but it’s not too speculative to imagine that houses with high-value contents will become digital faster than others and provide an attractive target for theft.

Digitizing old technologies, like the door-lock, is just another part of the IoT trend. Next year at Defcon we might see an analog+digital hacking kit, combining lock picks and hacker hardware to open your door. This is something we’re keeping a close eye on as we also develop tools that help monitor and manage your security.