SANS brings lockpicking to cybersecurity audience in Abu Dhabi webcast

SANS will put lockpicking in front of a cybersecurity audience on July 20, 2026, when Dr. Jérôme Dossogne leads Secrets & Keys of the Desert: A Locksport Introduction at SANS Abu Dhabi July 2026 Community Night at the Fairmont Bab Al Bahr in Abu Dhabi, UAE. The framing is blunt: this is a hands-on entry point into physical security, not a stunt table for curiosity seekers.

Dossogne is listed as a SANS instructor, researcher, cybersecurity architect, and founder of Torchlight, which gives the webcast a distinctly professional spine. SANS says the session will walk attendees through pin-tumbler lock mechanics, the tools that simulate keys, and the gaps attackers exploit, then tie those mechanics to threat, vulnerability, and impact. The setup also leans hard on informed consent and permission, the dividing line that has always separated locksport from the kind of behavior every serious community polices out.

For hobbyists, the most interesting part is what gets translated when a niche craft gets folded into cyber training. The webcast says most attendees successfully open their first lock in under 30 minutes, a detail that signals beginner-friendly instruction instead of insider bravado. That matters because the core locksport lesson is not just how to rake a cheap cylinder or feel for a binding pin, but how a simple mechanical system can fail in ways that map cleanly onto attacker thinking. What a professional audience gains is vocabulary and a risk model; what can get lost is the tactile patience and community culture that make the hobby fun in the first place.

SANS is not alone in treating locks as a classroom. NIST’s 2024 NICE K-12 Cybersecurity Education Conference drew nearly 500 participants and more than 80 speakers, and its Hands-on Lock Picking Village was described as critical for understanding physical security principles. NIST brought the village back the next year, and other conferences have followed the same path: the Australian Cyber Conference 2025 kept its Locksport Village open to all skill levels, while LayerOne 2026 packed its Lockpicking Village with practice locks, safe-and-vault locks, rare high-security locks, and mini-lectures. The pattern is clear enough that Abu Dhabi no longer looks like an outlier.

That shift has old roots. The Open Organisation of Lockpickers, or TOOOL, describes itself as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit built around public knowledge of locks and lock picking through teaching, research, and competition, with chapters in the United States and an affiliated chapter in Canada. TOOOL traces the ethics of the hobby back to A.C. Hobbs in 1853 and to Deviant Ollam’s DEF CON argument that exposing bad security protects everyone. SANS is now carrying that same idea into a room full of cybersecurity professionals, where a first pick on a practice lock is being treated less like a novelty and more like a credential.