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Robotic Kiosk Stores Digital Copies of Physical Keys

Posted by Soulskill on from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The New York Daily News reports that a startup company in Manhattan is putting robotic key copying machines in 7-Eleven stores. The machines can automatically create physical copies of common apartment and office keys. What's more interesting is that they allow users to save digital copies of their keys, which can later be created when the original is lost or the user is locked out of their home."

5 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Double edged sword... by mlts · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Copy of physical key's bitting dimensions + address info from a credit card. A remote intruder could download that, then sell lists of those to local gangs wanting some easy prey for home invasions.

    Of course, there is the fact that if you want to buy a bump-resistant lock [1], it won't be something a key copying kiosk can copy easily.

    [1]: I'm partial to Abloy's Protec2 Cliq line because it has the top tier mechanical pick resistance in addition to an electronic lock. Makes life easier to reprogram the lock to deny access just to the single lost key than have to rekey the lock and hand out new keys.

  2. Burglary Convenience? by Mad-Bassist · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Now we can't even trust the babysitter to grab a Slurpee down the street...

    I can only see this inspiring people with shifty morals to try something new because it's now more convenient. Good thing car keys are more complex these days.

    --
    "The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games." - Eugene Jarvis
  3. Sure, why not? by Valdrax · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That's what my roommates did at the house I live at. Keyless entry via numeric pad attached to a battery-powered* dead bolt. Simple, convenient, and no less secure than physical keys. It just replaces "something I have" with "something I know," and it isn't vulnerable to bump-keys or lock-picking tools.

    *Lasts for months and gives plenty of warning before it goes out, so no worries there.

    --
    If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
    1. Re:Sure, why not? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      High voltage electricity acts funny. It doesn't really respect things like insulation or air gaps. Normally-insulating materials like concrete become conductive. When indiscriminately applied to electronics, high voltage doesn't generally do what you want.

      Inappropriately high voltage to the contacts on a digital lock keypad -- not the faceplate, which is floating on a wooden jamb or grounded for a metal jamb -- will, at best, burn out the microcontroller which is responsible for engaging the relay which releases the door. At worst it will simply burn out the input pins responsible for the keypad, leaving a perfectly functional digital lock with no input available to unlock it.

      If you're lucky, or the protagonist in a drama, it will fail in exactly the right way to engage the relay while not damaging any of the other circuitry in the device. This is difficult to achieve in practice and rarely occurs outside of high-pressure situations in TV shows or movies.

      If the bolt relay is activated by putting +Vcc on a transistor or the legs of a solid-state relay, you will have to apply just the right voltage and current through the keypad in order to turn the microcontroller into a blob of solder. However, the resulting blob will simply short out the batteries, either sending no current to the relay, or leaving insufficient current available to drive the bolt motor. If the device has a pair of relays (one per motor direction) then both may become energized, resulting in no motion or a dead short.

      If the bolt relay is activated by grounding a pin, you're screwed unless the circuit designer added a failsafe where the bolt will be released if the microcontroller fails to initialize. Since the failsafe circuitry in most keypad locks is a few lines of code inside the microcontroller's interrupt handler, this is not likely to be triggered by the protagonist's magic lightning.

      I've seen a badly designed keypad lock drain its batteries trying to lock itself repeatedly when the batteries got low. The device had a beeper in it to alert users that its batteries were running low. After several days of unattended beeping, the lock suddenly began to beep twice a second while simultaneously engaging its lock motor. The low voltage began playing havoc with the latches on the keypad input pins and it was interpreting the incoming noise as a user pressing the "lock" button on the keypad. The batteries died in seconds once this failure mode took hold. Fortunately, people were on the correct side of the door to replace them.

  4. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I used to think this to. Then, about 10 years ago, an apartment complex I lived in turned on the heat for the winter. It was set to 65. This is when I realized that I had no thermostat in the apartment. They told me there was no way to turn it up, it was a "fixed system" uh huh... after a bit of exploring I found a locked door in the basement. I did a couple of internet searches, watched some videos and an hour later I was standing in the now unlocked utility room looking at a VERY adjustable thermostat which then got set to 75 for the rest of the winter. When it got too hot we'd just open a window.

    And just for clarification, picking a dead-bolt by a complete novice that had never done it before took all of 2min.