Copying keys from photos is child's playYou have memorised your passwords and your PIN is secret, now it is the house keys that must be hidden from prying pry·ing adj. Insistently or impertinently curious or inquisitive: ignored the prying journalists' questions. pry eyes. Using only a camera, a computer and a key-cutting machine, scientists have duplicated sets of keys after taking snaps of them from more than 60 metres away. Computer experts at the University of California The University of California has a combined student body of more than 191,000 students, over 1,340,000 living alumni, and a combined systemwide and campus endowment of just over $7.3 billion (8th largest in the United States). in San Diego San Diego (săn dēā`gō), city (1990 pop. 1,110,549), seat of San Diego co., S Calif., on San Diego Bay; inc. 1850. San Diego includes the unincorporated communities of La Jolla and Spring Valley. Coronado is across the bay. set out to show how easily keys could be copied from a digital image to highlight the potential security risk of leaving keys on display. At a computer conference in Alexandria, Virginia Alexandria is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 128,284. Located along the Western bank of the Potomac River, Alexandria is approximately 6 miles (9.6 kilometers) south of downtown Washington, DC. , Stefan Savage, a computer security expert who led the "Sneakey" project, surfed the photo-sharing website Flickr and found pictures that clearly showed peoples' keys, even if personal information in the shots had been blurred out. In one demonstration, the team cut duplicate keys Identical key data in a file. Primary keys, such as account number cannot be duplicated, since no two customers or employees should be assigned the same number. Secondary keys, such as date, product and city, may be duplicated in the file or database. after analysing images taken on a mobile phone. In another, they used a telephoto lens to take pictures of a set of keys on a cafe table from the roof of a university building. The software re-orients images of keys and determines the dimensions of the peaks and notches that connect with a lock's mechanism. Then the information can be plugged into a key-cutting machine to produce an exact replica. "We built our key duplication software system to show people that their keys are not inherently secret," Savage said. "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." Experts have been able to copy keys by hand from high-resolution photographs for some time, but Savage believes that cheap digital cameras and computer software mean almost anyone with basic technological know-how could do it. "If you go onto a photo-sharing site such as Flickr, you will find many photos of people's keys that can be used to easily make duplicates. While people generally blur out the numbers on their credit cards and driver's licences driver's licence Noun Canad & Austral an official document authorizing a person to drive a motor vehicle also called (in Britain and certain other countries): (driving licence) Noun 1. before putting those photos on-line, they don't realise that they should take the same precautions precautions Infectious disease The constellation of activities intended to minimize exposure to an infectious agent; precautions imply that the isolation of an infected Pt is optional, but not mandatory. with their keys," Savage said. 
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