Washington, October 30 : UC San Diego computer scientists have written a piece of software that can process pictures of keys from nearly all angles, and calculate the number and depth of cuts on them, which is all one requires to make a duplicate key.
“We built our key duplication software system to show people that their keys are not inherently secret,” said Stefan Savage, the computer science professor from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering who led the student-run project.
“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,” he added.