A Computer Program that Can Duplicate Keys from Photographs - Neatorama

Computer science students at UC San Diego have written a program that can duplicate keys from security camera photographs:

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.

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/10/ucsd-software-a.html

Great.

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Something tells me the days of the highly skilled lock pick with his fine metal tools and steady hand is gone. Behold the new era of breaking and entering.

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This doesn't seem like it would be too hard. I would think anyone that took a computer science course in computer graphics should be able to do this. I am surprised it took them this long

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This could get scary. It's becomming way to easy to be able to steal stuff now.

Just think about it. All a thief would have to do is take a photo of someones keys while they are not looking and they have instant access to that persons house or car...scary.

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Kind of pointless when a simple bump key can do the job in less than a second then having to go out take a picture, make the key then go though the door.

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As a locksmith I used to make keys from photocopies or pictures fairly often. The spacing between cuts is a given, and there are only a handful of different possible cut depths (between 3 and 6 for cars and between 7 and 9 for houses).
The fact of the matter is that if you are buying a cheap lock and expecting it to protect you adequately, you're wrong.

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What with bump keys and this, looks like someone will have to develop a new, cheap security technology. As is, looks like I now have something new to be paranoid about.

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