Old Security Falling to New Tech

From Wired:

Conventional security seems to be falling to new technology.

Without much thought I think it’s the combination of high-quality cameras, instant communication, and 3-D printing.

Making keys obsolete, after a simple scan with an iPhone app, is pretty colossal for security. But lockpicking has been available for years and it hasn’t made too much of a mark on how people perceive the security of common locks.

I think the issue is that a door lock is a minimum bar that economically hasn’t been bypassed by petty criminal incentive schemes.

You can do some back-of-the-napkin threat modeling and see that low-end burglars are simply going to move on if your door has a decent (common lock).

But any advanced burglar will bypass even much better ones. So the real trick is not getting targeted by one of them.

This being true, I think the photographing of keys is one more major attack against the efficacy of common door locks.

It could be that that facade is destroyed not by common thieves, but instead “friendlies”. Coworkers, neighbors, associates who have access to your keyring for a few minutes and may want to go exploring later.

Either way I imagine we’re getting to a point soon where having a strangely shaped piece of metal that you jam into a similarly strange shaped opening will go away.

I’d much rather use my iPhone, or iWatch to open my door.

Some will say that this is insecure for reasons x and y and z, but they will be forgetting the main point above: keys and door locks have been insecure for decades upon decades, yet they still sufficiently handle the minimum scenarios.

Death to the keyring. Long live the bio-security-token.

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