Not your data or virtual keys mind you. Over the last week, computer scientists from the University of California San Diego extension demonstrated a program that can duplicate a key with physically owning one, a process named teleduplication.

Stefan Savage, the university professor who acted as project led, summed up the obectives: “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.”

A scary process no doubt, but one that will probably only affect people who absent-mindedly leave their keys out for everyone to see. And you know no one sensible does that, right?

(image and source from ucsd.edu)

Post from: The Gadget Blog