Now, however, a computer equipped with a common image processing software that should not be difficult to write a professional
because you may be able to replace the expert eye of providing any offender from a photo,
information enough to produce the
duplicate key and be able to perpetrate the crime are.
The possibility of a kind of software is very real. So much so that to demonstrate this, a team of computer experts from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) has already created one. Your program can supply the technical data to duplicate a key, without any need to physically access it. It only takes a photo of a duplicate key.
"We built our key duplication software to show people that their keys are not inherently secret," says Stefan Savage, professor of computer science from the Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD who led the project, with the help of some of their students. "Perhaps it was once a reasonable assumption, but advances in optics and digital image acquisition have made it easier to duplicate keys from a distance without anyone even noticing."
The peaks and valleys in the keys to your home or office represent a numeric code that completely describes how to open your particular lock. If a key does not have this "code" should not open your door.
In a demonstration of the new software, the scientists took pictures of house keys with the current of a cell phone camera, then the supplied software, and he then produced the information needed to create identical copies.
In another example, used a camera with telephoto lens to capture images from the roof of a campus building and duplicate keys lying on a coffee table about 60 meters away.
"This should cause little surprise to locksmiths or lock vendors," says Savage. "There are experts who have been able to copy keys by hand from high-resolution photos. However, what we noticed is that the threat has increased significantly because the digital cameras have become more common as a result the emergence of cheap image sensors and also to the basic techniques of computer vision can automatically extract key information without requiring specialized knowledge. "
However, the general public does not value properly the idea that the keys are visual information confidential. Many people leave the key with all its keys, including the house, on the table before which sit in a public venue, believing that the only danger is that somebody will take, and as this can not happen because do it all the time and at your fingertips to prevent the physical theft, not to worry.
Something similar happens with amateur photographers, who use objects as models for your property. "If you go to a site like Flickr for sharing photos, you'll find many photos of key people who can be readily used to make duplicates. While people often smearing the numbers on your credit cards and driver's licenses before putting these online pictures of documents, not realizing that they should take the same precautions with their keys, "Savage alert.
Probably all the keys of the future have added an electronic code to the code to supplement their physical peaks and valleys, but in the meantime, the advice given is that we try our Savage keys as if they were credit cards, keeping them hidden in my pocket view of the world, only to remove them when we go to use them and with due caution.