A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Locksmiths UCSD News (10/29/08) Kane, Daniel
as it appeared in the October 31, 2008 edition of ACM TechNews.
University of California, San Diego (UCSD) computer scientists have developed software that can duplicate a key using only a photograph of the key. A key's bumps and depressions represent a numeric code that describes how to open the key's corresponding lock. "We built our key duplication software system to show people that their keys are not inherently secret," says UCSD professor Stefan Savage. "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." Savage presented the research at ACM's Conference on Communications and Computer Security, which takes place Oct. 27-31 in Alexandria, Virginia. In one demonstration of the new software, the researchers took pictures of a residential house key with a cell phone camera and ran the image through their software, producing the information needed to create identical copies. In another demonstration, the researchers used a five-inch telephoto lens to take pictures of keys sitting on a cafe table from more than 200 feet away. Savage notes that locksmiths and lock vendors have been able to copy keys by hand from high-resolution photographs for some time. However, the threat has reached a new level, with cheap image sensors making digital cameras readily available, and basic computer vision techniques are able to automatically extract a key's information without requiring any expertise. View Full Article
