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Earlier this year, a new type of mobile app blew the collective minds of many—including NBC News investigative reporter Jeff Rossen. Using the camera of a smartphone, these applications could scan a house key, allowing it to be duplicated remotely. Rossen warned America that it could allow someone to digitally steal your house keys if you left them unattended—by uploading photos and getting shipped a custom-cut copy. Of course, they could do the same thing with your house keys just by running with them to a nearby hardware store. But hackers !
One of the contenders in this market is called KeyMe ( https://key.me/ ). No one is going to shoulder surf your house key with KeyMe—it requires photos of a key placed on a white background, taken from 4 inches away. But KeyMe is doing something that will further boggle minds and will likely raise even more security concerns: using the app, you can store scanned copies of your keys on their server and download them at a kiosk. The company has been rolling out kiosks across the country and has just expanded its fleet after inking a deal to place them at the Lowe's home improvement chain. And you can also share your keys with others via e-mail, allowing them to make copies for themselves.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by khchung on Sunday March 22 2015, @07:20AM
KeyMe - so it became trivial for burglars to enter your home when* their servers got compromised and all the key images stolen?
* - when, not if.
Make more sense if the kiosks can accept an image from USB stick, print out the key for a price, then delete the image immediately afterwards. By storing the images in their cloud, you can be sure they will be (1) finding ways to link more of your data to make money, and (2) sending copies of the images to NSA, willingly or unwillingly. Both meaning less security for users.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Sunday March 22 2015, @05:16PM
well, if you have physically go there, it would be better to just have a direct scanner for the physical key, so you can't just photograph someone elses keys and make dups...