Kid’s toy challenges garage door security?

Last thing at bedtime, you check the doors of your Crystal Lake home. Once you’re certain all the doors are locked – from front door to back including the garage door, and confident that you and the family are safe – you turn off the lights and head to bed. But are those doors as secure as you assume?

Imagine, just for something outlandish, that a child’s toy could open your garage door? Of course, that’s ridiculous. No child’s toy can override the security built into your garage door opener. It’s simply absurd.

That kid’s toy CAN open garage doors 

As demonstrated in an online podcast, a kid’s toy can, in fact, be modified to open many garage doors – to activate the garage door openers.

The toy used in the demonstration is the IM-ME device from Mattel. With a little knowledge of data codes, some relatively tech savvy individuals can open many of the electric garage door openers around the world, including those in your Crystal Lake neighborhood.

Some hackers discovered that the IM-ME will do the work to determine the codes for garage door openers. And it doesn’t take long.

Many garage door openers use 8-bit codes. With an 8-bit code, there are 256 variations of possible code combinations. It takes about 32 milliseconds to send one variant of the code. That means that it would take about 8 seconds for the toy to send all 256 variations. If your garage door has an 8-bit code, and no other lines of defense, that toy is going to open your garage door.

Fortunately, today, many garage door openers have 12-digit codes. That’ll slow ‘em down a little. 

With a 12-digit code, there are 4,096 variations of codes. That should mean that it will take 128 seconds. In other words, someone will have to work for just over two minutes to get in through your garage. But, it turns out, neither is the case.

It turns out that the codes are read in an overlapping fashion. This means that, if you have a string of all variations of the code, the garage door opener starts at the beginning. When that code fails, it drops the first digit and tries again. Then the next digit and so on. This condenses the codes dramatically. 

Instead of 8 seconds, it takes about 1 second for the toy to crack the code to your garage door, if you have an 8-digit code. If you have a 12-digit code, it might slow them down to 16 seconds. 

This is bad news for those counting on garage door openers to provide security from the garage. The good news is that the manufacturers of garage door openers have caught on to these ‘little loopholes’ in the security they provide. 

New garage doors are built to block the hackers, whether they use a toy or something more sophisticated.