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This is Scientific Americans 60-Second Science. I'm Sarah Vitalk.

Someone who knows how can pick a lock using just a paperclip.

But how about with a smartphone?

Researchers at the National University of Singapore wondered if smartphone audio of a key

turning inside a lock could be used to figure out the shape of that key. And spoiler alert,

under the right conditions, they could create a few very good candidate keys, including the correct

key. Sundari Ramesh, a grad student who led the work on the project, which the researchers

called Spy Key, said that the work was inspired by some previous research where the movement of

smartwatches on people's wrists was used to figure out the code of combination locks.

Essentially what they did was they were looking at smartwatches on your wrist in order to infer

the pin to the combination lock. So in some sense, they're able to measure the angle, right?

So we were like, okay, wait, people are doing this for combination locks. Maybe like there are some,

similar insights that we can apply to other kinds of locks. And the most revealing kind of locks is

these kind of physical locks and keys. The first task for the team was to get audio from a key

opening a lock and to see if they could pull useful information out of that audio. Whenever you insert

a key into a lock, it produces a series of click sounds. The pins of the lock moving over the

...