Science & Outdoors
Tech Tidbit: Watch where you set your keys
The Pointer
kbose675@uwsp.edu
Be careful when you pull your keys out from now on. A software program was recently developed by United States computer scientists at the University of California-San Diego that can make copies of keys without the real thing.
This new software can duplicate keys merely from photos. Even photos taken with cell phones or from hundreds of feet away can be used to copy the keys.
“We built our key duplication software system to show people that their keys are not inherently secret,” said in a statement Stefan Savage, the computer science professor from UC-San Diego who led the student-run project. “Perhaps this was once a reasonable assumption, but advances in digital imaging and optics have made it easy to duplicate someone’s keys from a distance without them even noticing.”
The technology works because keys used in most common residential locks in the United States have a series of five or six cuts, spaced out at regular intervals. The computer scientists created a program that can process photos of keys from almost any angle and measure the depth of each cut. If you bring together the depth of each cut and you have the keys “bitting” code, along with the basic information on the brand and type of key, you have all you need to make a duplicate.
Creators of the technology warn that people using such sites as Facebook or MySpace may have pictures of their keys already on the Internet, which can easily be used to make a duplicate.
“While people generally blur out the numbers on their credit cards and driver’s licenses before putting those photos online, they don’t realize that they should take the same precautions with their keys,” said Savage.
Though the researchers have not released their code to the general public, they do acknowledge that it would not be too difficult for someone with a basic knowledge of MatLab and computer vision techniques to build a similar system.
