Software That Can Duplicate Keys From Images

The past two decades have ushered in a variety of identify-theft related threats, but this may be the scariest one of all: a new type of software called “Sneakey” developed by programmers at UC San Diego can use almost any image of a key to create an exact real-life replica.

The scariest part? The picture doesn’t even have to be good. UC San Diego’s programming team was able to create a successful key replica using an image taken from 200 feet away.

Sneakey works by normalizing the key’s size and position in such a way that each pixel corresponds to a known distance. The program can then easily extract the key cuts and bitting code.

While the UCSD researchers have not released the Sneakey code to the public, they believe that anyone with a basic knowledge of MatLab and computer vision techniques could build a comparable system.

I imagine that Sneakey could be very useful for government and defense purposes, but it could be disastrous in the wrong hands. If you have pictures of your keys up on Flickr for any reason, now might be a good time to take them down.

Photo Credit: UCSD