Human behavior toward keys makes mechanical locks insecure. We've been able to reproduce keys, even fairly complex ones, well before 3D printers came along. Get a clean enough impression/scan/photograph and we can make it happen, perhaps 3D printing is seen as making it more accessible to the general population.

I'm about to go on a whole thing here, so let me first say that I am excited about their work and I have personally been pushing for years to see more high security key printing happening (see Nirav Patel's Abus Plus key printing[0])

What I take umbrage with is the idea that this development is going to be the death of mechanical locks. Even the suggestion that it _should_ be the death of mechanical locks. In the Forbes article [1] One of the students behind this work suggested that his goal was the elimination of mechanical locks:

"If we show that mechanical locks are vulnerable to key duplication just by having a handful of numbers you can download off the internet, hopefully they'll be phased out more quickly," says Van Albert.

What this fails to address is that the cuts on your key are supposed to be a secret, and your behavior toward your keys should be the same as your behavior toward a password. You don't pass it around and you are very careful about who you trust it with.

I also dislike the characterization of the discovery of the "numbers" in the main and sidebar bittings. That information has been publicly available and the suggestion that they "reverse-engineered" (from their abstract submitted to defcon)[2] the lock is a bit dramatic. Better, I think, to say that they "read the documentation."

Obviously I have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to mechanical security, but I am confident saying that any call for the blanket abolition of mechanical locks is short-sighted and narrow-minded. This could have been an amazing opportunity to address human behavior as it relates to mechanical security, but instead it was wasted on the age-old call for the death of locks. There remain myriad places where a traditional lock is still required, there are myriad populations who are not able to sustain electronic locks.

If the day does come when mechanical locks can be left to the dust of history, it will be more likely the result of dramatic shifts in society than in technology. It will be the death of all locks, not just mechanical ones.

[0] https://github.com/nrpatel/PhysicalKeygen/blob/master/abus_p... [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/03/mit-stu... [2] https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-21/dc-21-speakers.html#La...