Garage door openers - thieves breaking in??

20 years ago

I heard recently that it's become relatively common for thieves to break in to garages that have a remote control keypad with a device that sends multiple codesets, one after the other, until the garage code is dialed in.

Makes me nervous - and I'm wondering how to protect against this. Does anyone know if garage door opener companies have acknowledged this issue, and which, if any, have addressed the problem?

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Comments (7)

Don_
20 years ago
That was a problem many years ago. The way it worked was the crook followed you home and had a piece of equipment called a 'code grabber'. When you opened your door it learned your code and they could come back later, open your door and rob you. Now we have technology that changes the code every time you use the opener. Their 'code grabber' is probably for sale on e-bay.
brickeyee
20 years ago
The newer remotes use a rolling code (Texas Instruments is one vendor of teh chip).
Each code is used once and then the code sequence advances to a new code.
Most receivers have a short table of codes (~128 is common). Each tiem the remote is pushed it also advances one code step. The receiver nedds the table in case the remote is operated out of range.
After a code is received, the receiver regenerates the table based on the most recent code, thus keeeping alignement with the remote. They are very secure against recording and finding the spot on the pattern since it is 2^40 long.
That is 1,099,511,627,776 combinations.
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brickeyee
20 years ago
The old units with a set of switches only had 256 combinations and could be spoofed by trying every combination.
surfer1966
20 years ago
I bought a chamberlain whisper drive a few months ago. Do you know how many code combinations it has?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000CGGD6/002-7225222-3804054?v=glance&n=228013
surfer1966
20 years ago
I bought a chamberlain whisper drive a few months ago. Do you know how many code combinations it has?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000CGGD6/002-7225222-3804054?v
Don_
20 years ago
Your whisper drive has the rolling code. According to brickeyee it has 1,099,511,627,776 combinations. I have no reason to doubt his figures.
pjb999
20 years ago
Thanks for the answers here, you prompted me to look at my own opener's manual - vendors only supplied one opener with the house, they admittedly do appear to have been pretty stupid, but a niggly doubt makes me wonder if they did lose the opener or kept it? Agent tried to tell me it's 'normal' for only one remote to be supplied with a single garage but I've never heard such a load of old cobblers, besides, the book clearly states two are supplied.

The good news is, I can wipe all the remotes from the opener's repetoire, then add just the one I have, making the missing one useless for opening this place, anyway.