Hard to believe, but still true—not only your bank account may be hacked by digital means, but your door key as well.

The article here is an excerpt. Read the complete article.

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Reconsidering Physical Key Secrecy: Teleduplication via Optical Decoding

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Benjamin Laxton	Kai Wang	Stefan Savage
University of California, San Diego	University of California, San Diego	University of California, San Diego

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ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2008

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Abstract
The access control provided by a physical lock is based on the assumption that the information content of the corresponding key is private—that duplication should require either possession of the key or a priori knowledge of how it was cut. However, the ever-increasing capabilities and prevalence of digital imaging technologies present a fundamental challenge to this privacy assumption. Using modest imaging equipment and standard computer vision algorithms, we demonstrate the effectiveness of physical key teleduplication—extracting a key's complete and precise bitting code at a distance via optical decoding and then cutting precise duplicates. We describe our prototype system, Sneakey, and evaluate its effectiveness, in both laboratory and real-world settings, using the most popular residential key types in the U.S.

Citation
Benjamin Laxton, Kai Wang, and Stefan Savage
Reconsidering Physical Key Secrecy: Teleduplication via Optical Decoding.
ACM CCS 2008, Alexandria, VA, October 2008.

Paper
Paper pdf.

Code
The code for this project was developed in Matlab. If there is sufficient interest I may release it in the future.

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Copyright 2008 by Benjamin Laxton

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This is an excerpt. Read the complete article.

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