A entrance to a mini-storage place is probably OK to be weak. Presumably, you are required to have a proper lock on your own unit. Likewise, the PIN is generally the 2nd factor (along with "something you have") for important things. I'm OK with the convenience of having only a 4 digit PIN on my ATM card since I can reasonably protect & deactivate the card. If someone forces me to enter my pin under duress, it doesn't really matter how many digits it is.
You'd like the entrance to be strong, because access to the entrance grants you secluded access to all the units, and angle grinders beat locks in seconds, proper locks in just a few more seconds.
Of course, cars beat entrance gates pretty easily too.
Or do you mean they might prevent theft? Or deter it? It is my experience that they are pretty useless at both.
On that note, I don't think the absence of a super strong lock on the front door of a storage place invites criminals. I live near open air storage facilities where anyone can just walk up to the units, like they're walking by cars on the street or in a parking lot. Thefts from storage units are just not big enough of an issue to require additional measures.
In my mother tongue there's a saying that that roughly translates to "The lock on the door isn't there to keep you out. It's there to communicate that you're not wanted there."
But this is coming from a culture that's rather communal where shared property is often the default.
Poster: "I was ripping my dirt bike out in the snow and got pulled over!"
Commenter 1: "What for?"
Commenter 2: "5150."
Barcroft Station in California (elevation 3800 m) has house number 5150 over the door. You'd have to be crazy to want to work there.
When Eddie took the rights with him to Fender and they made the EVH 5150 (another fantastic amp), Peavey renamed this line to the 6505 series, so there you have another four-digit code to use.
M1 is - I think - the form they have to fill out to put you on a temporary hold.
"How about (digits)?"
"You can't use that one. Someone else has already chosen that."
"Wait, now I know someone else's PIN code. I could use that and it'd be logged under their name."
“Which password?”
“Any password.”
“Hunter2”
“Welcome!”
*
As a memory rule, astrisk looks like a star, asteriskos means ”little star” in greek and is related to asterology.
Every security mechanism is breakable with enough budget
If the pin is chosen randomly with a uniform distribution over the 0000 to 9999 range, then the average brute force search will probe 5000.5 combinations.
I'm sure there's an optimal sequence of keypresses that tests all 10000 codes in something like 30,000 keypresses rather than the naive 40,000.
This made me uncomfortable when I was selling a house, so naturally I wrote some code to generate a string of digits that would cover the full solution space most efficiently.
Armed with this "master key", I had the lockbox open in negligible time. Honestly I think it was just a few minutes, and I was about halfway through the string.
This let me put the key out only when a showing was happening, and I brought the lockbox to the closing, which baffled the real estate agent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence
It seems that you can do it in 10003 key presses. Calculation for this this exact example is in the Wikipedia page.
Case in point: I had a unit at a mini-storage place once. And you needed a 4 digit PIN to get through the gate. And I forgot the PIN I used. I was sitting at the gate for a minute, staring at the keypad and realized "wait... hundreds of people have PINs in this system and the system doesn't care which one you use". So I just needed a PIN that somebody used. So I started with years that would have been reasonable birth years for an average adult at that time and starting going up. I think it took about 6 tries to find a valid PIN.
Now granted, this is different than trying to brute force a specific person's PIN. But even then, I expect that in many cases an informed search will crack it a lot faster than a purely sequential search or a random search. Using common birth years, well known numbers like "5150", "1234", "4321", etc. is probably going to work a lot of times.