Duplicating Keys Using Photos

I’m sure that you don’t let people stare at you’re credit card number and at your driver’s licence number, but you will leave your keys in plain sight and won’t see it as a security threat. But scientists proved that with some medium knowledge of computers, a photo of your key can be turned into a copy.

Most people rely on keys because you can’t use it or duplicate it if you don’t have it, but a team of computer scientists from UC San Diego have developed a sneaky software that will be able to break a key’s code using a photo. Each common key (not the modern key with asimetric sides) is basically a numeric code, represented by the height of the bumps. The software, actually called “Sneaky” does just that : finds the numeric code. Then a locksmith can build a copy of your key.

In one demonstration of this software photos from a cell phone were used and in another, a high resolution camera took pictures from a roof of a key 60 meters away. Both methods produced identical copies of the original keys.

Stefan Savage, the man that led the student-run project, is a computer science professor from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering. Their intentions were to make the genera public aware of this threat. There are many people who even post photos with some keys in the background online without knowing that that picture is a big threat to their security, and this is what this project is intended to do : prevent people from making this kind of mistakes in the future.

The software works by requesting 3 user-defined points in space as control points for the three dimensions. This is a technique broadly used in computer vision. Benjamin Laxton, the man who wrote the code (which was not released to the public) explains : “The program is simple. You only need to click a few control points in the image of the key and the ‘Sneakey’ program does the rest. It normalizes the key’s size and position so that each pixel then corresponds to a known distance. From this information, the height of each of the key cuts can easily be computed and likewise the bitting code can be extracted,”

Some might say that burglars are not scientists, but Laxton adds that a man with basic knowledge of Mathlab and computer vision techniques can build a similar system that can be used for copying your keys without knowing.

More and more companies produce keys with electromagnetic secrets as well as a physical code, but classical keys are still used in more than 95 percent of the locks, so you might consider keeping your keys out of sight in the future.