Hacking your house key

Here’s something as cool as it is concerning:

If theseguys have a photograph of your house key, even one taken with a cellphone camera from 200 feet away, they can feed it into a piece of software called SNEAKEY and load the resulting file into a $400 3D printer which will then spit out a duplicate key that can open your front door.

Now that’s some Mission Impossible shizz.

Turns out, there aren’t a lot of variables with most house keys: a handful of standard types and brands, and then five or six cuts of varying depths. SNEAKEY can identify your brand and type and then measure the depths of the cuts, regardless of the angle the photo is taken at. It then uses other visual reference points in the photo to calculate the size of the key, and voila! A 3D file that can be shaved layer by layer out of a block of wood or plastic with an increasingly affordable object printer.

3D printing is still more or less the realm of hobbyists—it works, but on a slow and small scale. Complicated objects must be printed out one piece at a time over the course of hours and then assembled like toys. But keys are simple, one-piece objects that suggest a new, more practical use for 3D printers—burglary!

With the recent rash of hack attacks, one senses a loss of public confidence in assets that exist in purely digital form. But before you convert those abstract pixels on your online banking statement into cold hard cash and stuff it all under your mattress, keep in mind that the physical world is increasingly accessible through digitization.