I could have used this technique last night — I got home to my apartment in Oakland at 11:30, only to realize I’d left my keys in Sacramento. Two hours later a locksmith finally came and charged me $100 to let me in my own apartment. Expensive? Maybe, but comparable to other services, and compared to the havoc that a lock-breaker could wreak if he was trying to use his talents for crime rather than service, it’s a small price.

It’s kind of frightening to see how quickly a skilled lock-picker can jimmy a lock and get in. But new technology makes it even simpler — apparently all you need is a good telephoto lens to break in to someone’s house — just wait till they leave their keys out on a table, snap a picture, and take it to an unethical key maker, and wha-la, a perfect replica:

“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.”

Professor Savage presents this work on October 30 at ACM’s Conference on Communications and Computer Security (CCS) 2008, one of the premier academic computer security conferences.

Read the full article here.