Duplicating Your Housekeys, From a Distance

[cheesehead]

Yet another aspect of The End of Privacy:

http://it.slashdot.org/it/08/10/30/1832214.shtml

"Keys Can be Copied From Afar, Jacobs School Computer Scientists Show"

http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/new...ase.sfe?id=791

UC San Diego computer scientists have built a software program that can perform key duplication without having the key. Instead, the computer scientists only need a photograph of the key.

“We built our key duplication software system to show people that their keys are not inherently secret,” said Stefan Savage, the computer science professor from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering 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 bumps and valleys on your house or office keys represent a numeric code that completely describes how to open your particular lock. If a key doesn’t encode this precise “bitting code,” then it won’t open your door.

In one demonstration of the new software system, the computer scientists took pictures of common residential house keys with a cell phone camera, fed the image into their software which then produced the information needed to create identical copies. In another example, they used a five inch telephoto lens to capture images from the roof of a campus building and duplicate keys sitting on a café table about 200 feet away.

“This idea should come as little surprise to locksmiths or lock vendors,” said Savage. “There are experts who have been able to copy keys by hand from high-resolution photographs for some time. However, we argue that the threat has turned a corner—cheap image sensors have made digital cameras pervasive and basic computer vision techniques can automatically extract a key’s information without requiring any expertise.”

Professor Savage notes, however, that the idea that one’s keys are sensitive visual information is not widely appreciated in the general public.

. . .

[Uncwilly]

This is not news. Most keys are cut via a code now-a-days. Not duplicating a copy that you have, but when they are made intially. I was discussing this with somebody just this week. For years, I have known about using wax or clay to quickly and surreptitiously make a negative of a key. Next, are you going to warn us about bump keys?

There are ways of making standard locks more secure than they normally are. But, then again, security is a relative thing.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

This is not news.

There are certain sentences which explain why this may well be news to even the people who know what you describe about key-making:

"... advances in digital imaging and optics have made it easy to duplicate someone’s keys from a distance without them even noticing."

"... we argue that the threat has turned a corner—cheap image sensors have made digital cameras pervasive and basic computer vision techniques can automatically extract a key’s information without requiring any expertise...

... the idea that one’s keys are sensitive visual information is not widely appreciated in the general public."

For years, I have known about using wax or clay to quickly and surreptitiously make a negative of a key.

... which requires physical contact with the key, unlike the threat that is the subject of the article.

Next, are you going to warn us about bump keys?

Well, I was taught how to open a lock (well, "some" locks) with two ordinary paper clips. Now, paper clips aren't in the same class as bump keys, but the basic principle of how they work (bouncing the tumblers while applying side pressure to the cylinder) is the same. Warning about bump keys (or paper clips) would be in an older, more traditional category than warning about the new risks of mere visual exposure of one's keys.

Are you going to warn your key-ring-carrying-on-belt-or-lanyard (or habitually-placing-keys-out-on-a-surface-next-to-them) friends about the possibility of increasingly-easy duplication from a distance without any physical contact or notice?

But, then again, security is a relative thing.

Yes, indeed, and it's changing for the worse -- leaving your key(s) on a table or counter beside one during a meal, or on a keyring attached to ones belt but not concealed from view, is no longer as safe as it used to be because neither physical contact, expensive equipment, or esoteric knowledge is required any longer.

[ewmayer]

In other words, what we have here is a high-tech version of "Public Key Kleptography"?