A safe with a combination lock is a good idea if you have valuables you want to protect -- but what if you lose or forget your combination? You might consider trying to guess the right combination by trial and error. How long this takes would depend largely on the number of possible combinations. The more digits in your combination. the larger the number of combinations you'd have to try.
Let's imagine that a hypothetical safe-cracker has saved some money by opting for a cheaper safe, one with a combination lock that only has four digits. Each digit could be a number from nought to nine -- ten possibilities. To work out how many possible combinations there are altogether, you must raise the number of possible values for each digit to the power of the number of digits: in this case, ten to the power of four (or 10^4). This means that the total number of combinations would be 10 times 10 times 10 times 10: ten thousand.
Let's say that our safe-cracker decides to try each combination turn, hoping to stumble across the one that opens the lock. Assuming that he has to try every single combination once (since we already know he's unlucky enough to lose his combination, we can safely assume it's inevitable that he'll have to try every single possible combination before he gets the right one). If each combination takes one second to line up, it will take a total of ten thousand seconds to try each one. That's a total of two hours, 46 minutes and forty seconds -- certainly be enough to deter most casual thieves. Our honest safe-cracker will be working late tonight but he won't need to call the locksmith or destroy his safe.
You can use the same formula for any number of digits. If each digit is a number from 0 to 9, the number of combinations is always 10^n, where n is the number of digits. Each extra digit raises the number of combinations by a power of ten. A five-digit lock has 10^5 combinations: 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 = 100,000. Assuming our original estimate of one second per combination, that's 27.78 hours. Bad news for thieves -- unless they managed to carry the safe back to a bolt-hole where they could try combinations in peace, it's unlikely they'd guess the right one. Unfortunately it's also bad news for our honest safe-cracker -- if he worked on the safe every day for eight hours a day, it would take him three and a half days' work to get the safe open.
If the lock has a keypad instead of a dial, he could look at patterns of wear on the keys to see which ones were pressed most often. Let's say that there's a four-digit combination and the 1, 4, 7 and 9 keys have definitely been pressed much more than the others. Now life is much easier: there are only four possibilities for each digit. The number of combinations is 4^4: only 256 possible combinations. Assuming one second per combination, it'll only take 4 minutes and 16 seconds to open the safe.The Honest Man’s Guide to Breaking Into a Safe
A safe with a combination lock is a good idea if you have valuables you want to protect -- but what if you lose or forget your combination? You might consider trying to guess the right combination by trial and error. How long this takes would depend largely on the number of possible combinations. The more digits in your combination. the larger the number of combinations you'd have to try.
Let's imagine that a hypothetical safe-cracker has saved some money by opting for a cheaper safe, one with a combination lock that only has four digits. Each digit could be a number from nought to nine -- ten possibilities. To work out how many possible combinations there are altogether, you must raise the number of possible values for each digit to the power of the number of digits: in this case, ten to the power of four (or 10^4). This means that the total number of combinations would be 10 times 10 times 10 times 10: ten thousand.
Let's say that our safe-cracker decides to try each combination turn, hoping to stumble across the one that opens the lock. Assuming that he has to try every single combination once (since we already know he's unlucky enough to lose his combination, we can safely assume it's inevitable that he'll have to try every single possible combination before he gets the right one). If each combination takes one second to line up, it will take a total of ten thousand seconds to try each one. That's a total of two hours, 46 minutes and forty seconds -- certainly be enough to deter most casual thieves. Our honest safe-cracker will be working late tonight but he won't need to call the locksmith or destroy his safe.
You can use the same formula for any number of digits. If each digit is a number from 0 to 9, the number of combinations is always 10^n, where n is the number of digits. Each extra digit raises the number of combinations by a power of ten. A five-digit lock has 10^5 combinations: 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 = 100,000. Assuming our original estimate of one second per combination, that's 27.78 hours. Bad news for thieves -- unless they managed to carry the safe back to a bolt-hole where they could try combinations in peace, it's unlikely they'd guess the right one. Unfortunately it's also bad news for our honest safe-cracker -- if he worked on the safe every day for eight hours a day, it would take him three and a half days' work to get the safe open.
If the lock has a keypad instead of a dial, he could look at patterns of wear on the keys to see which ones were pressed most often. Let's say that there's a four-digit combination and the 1, 4, 7 and 9 keys have definitely been pressed much more than the others. Now life is much easier: there are only four possibilities for each digit. The number of combinations is 4^4: only 256 possible combinations. Assuming one second per combination, it'll only take 4 minutes and 16 seconds to open the safe.
Search
Use our discount code at checkout to purchase products mentioned in this article. Plus find thousands of security and storage products at our online shop