The “Break it Down” Blog

John Hering sent in a link to a story about UC Sand Diego computer programmers that have developed an image-recognition software algorithm that can reproduce a physical key only from a picture of the key.

Maybe not the most surprising thing in the face of recently announced 2D-to-3D image generation technology, but leads to an interesting breach of security that we hadn’t really considered before. Think of a security clerk sitting at his desk, unless his keys are hidden from sight, someone from 100s of feet away would effectively “steal his keys”.

The most likely side effect of this short-term, is key-awareness going up, and longer term, the adoption of electronic likes will likely see a spike up.