Researchers Dupe Keys Using Photos

Teleduplication allows researchers to reproduce working key copies just by snapping photos of them - even from afar.

If you thought your house key was safe from duplication just because you never loaned it out long enough for anyone to make a copy, you may want to invest in a few more deadbolts for the front door – and a pitbull, while you’re at it. A team of researchers from the University of California, San Diego, has figured out how to duplicate keys merely by taking pictures of them from afar.

As a proof of concept, the team was able to snap a picture of a keyring from 195 feet away using a telephoto lens and still produce a working key using their prototype system, dubbed Sneakey. It uses computer vision algorithms to effectively extract the key’s “bitting code” from a simple image of it, allowing physical duplicates to be reproduced later with precision.

The team shared the detailed findings from their research in a paper [PDF] released earlier this week. Though they haven’t released any software to accomplish so-called teleduplication, they do speculate that the findings from their research could probably be reproduced using Matlab.