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A photograph of your apartment key is enough to enable someone to
unlock your door, thanks to a new technology developed by computer
scientists at UC San Diego.
Led
by computer science professor Stefan Savage, a group of students
devised a way for a computer program to create a duplicate of a key by
simply analyzing a photograph of it. Each bump and valley on a key
represents a numeric code, which completely describes how to open any
lock, according to UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering publication.
The
team demonstrated the software at ACM’s Conference on Communications
and Computer Security 2008, where students showed off the technique up
close and from afar. They took close-up shots of keys with a cell phone
camera. Then, using a 5-inch telephoto lens, they stood on top of a
building and took photos of keys sitting on a table 200 feet away. In
both examples, they were able to capture sufficient data to create
duplicate keys.
As neat as the technique sounds, the computer
scientists are aware it will instill fear in those who have posted
photos of their keys on public photo sites such as Flickr. However,
Savage says
for quite some time, some expert locksmiths have
been able to copy keys by hand from looking at high-resolution photos. The computer scientists’ project would simply
enable anybody with the software to do the same.
To address the concern, some companies are developing keys that contain
computer chips, so they’d need to both physically fit the lock and send
the proper code to open it.
Keys Can be Copied From Afar, Jacobs School Computer Scientists Show [UCSD Jacobs]
Photo: UCSD
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