A new and innovative technique has been developed by the security researchers, with which they can copy house keys just by using its picture as reference.

This technique has been developed by computer scientists at UC San Diego, and it needs no physical access to keys and only a fairly low resolution picture for the software to work. The scientist say that this technique has been developed by team with the aim to reveal to everyone that keys are not as secure as they are thought to be.

A camera phone picture was taken of a residential key in one of the demo by the computer scientists, in order to obtain information, needed to create identical copies with the help of image-recognition software. In another exercise, with the use of a 5in telephoto lens, a picture of key was taken from 200 feet away.

Software named Sneakey, was developed by the San Diego team, which has the ability of examining photos from nearly any angle to measure the depth of each cut, also called the bitting code. This information along with the brand and key type knowledge is more than sufficient to create a duplicate key.

Stefan Savage, a computer science professor from UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering reported, "We built our key duplication software system to show people that their keys are not inherently secret. 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."

At the ACM's Conference on Communications and Computer Security 2008 in Alexandria, Virginia on Thursday (30 October), Professor Savage presented the student-led research.