Sure, you can do that now with Shapeways or a crooked locksmith, but it would be fun to do independently.
But this is kind of shocking for software-oriented people who might think that "manufacturing" "hardware" is a super-tough black art that can only be done by professionals in factories. And indeed that's pretty much my intuition as a software person who hasn't done woodworking since middle school shop class and never learned any of the other manufacturing skills that humanity has been working on for the last while. (Reading Bunnie's new book about manufacturing in China has been fascinating for me, because it's like "oh yeah, so all of these objects just come from people doing different tasks to fabricate them"!)
So people said about gun manufacturing that there was this funny intuition that 3D printing somehow allows people to casually manufacture complex objects at home which they otherwise simply couldn't do. But in fact, if people were moderately motivated, they could easily learn some of the other techniques that let them manufacture and/or duplicate objects. So we may tend to exaggerate the impact by thinking that other methods represent a huge, hard barrier while 3D printing represents true "push-button manufacturing". Neither side of this intuition is necessarily the reality.
For the problem of duplicating proprietary keys, it seems like anyone could already do this at home without especially expensive equipment and without especially extensive training. I remember reading a Mickey Mouse cartoon from many decades ago where a key was supposed to be duplicated from a negative impression taken in some clay (or something), and this was presented as a basic skill of a generalist mechanic!
On the other hand, maybe this intuition is partly right if some significant population of would-be home gunsmiths or key-copiers is intimidated enough by hardware and manufacturing that they're sort of waiting around for the pushbutton solution.
Edit: looks like other people in this thread have said this a lot more concisely. :-)
I help run a Makerspace, a couple of times a year I get a teenage boy (and it is always a boy) come thru the door wanting to print a gun .... after I've given him the lecture about how stupidly dangerous that is, I then remind him that a) here in NZ hand guns are illegal, and b) he would still need to be police vetted and obtain a firearms license - the law doesn't change because you used a 3D printer
That's actually a substantial barrier. People are lazy, and pressing 'print' on some design fed into a cornucopia machine (of which a 3D printer is a rudimentary fore-runner) substantially lowers that barrier. It requires no special knowledge beyond the feeding of raw materials into hoppers.
That's a lot less than what would be required to safely turn on a lathe, let alone making something with it.
It's "security through the inordinate difficulty of acquiring an object with a particular shape." Cheap 3D printing of metal might put an end to that strategy.
Then you can plug that bitting code into a script which will generate an STL model for the key. [3]
I did this, except I measured the key with calibers and back-calculated the key number. I printed the key on a cheap Prusa I3 in ABS, it was not impressive in terms of resolution or strength, but it did work in my house. I carefully tested it because I thought it might break off in the lock, and it felt weak, but worked -- definitely good enough for a single covert access, or even use as an emergency backup key to hide somewhere.
No fancy metal printer needed, and you could write a script to pull pictures of keys out of twitter or whatever and automate the process.
[1] http://hackaday.com/2009/09/22/photographic-key-duplication/
[2] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kxuH9jR...
I get my keys cut at a convenience store down the street. Key cutting is not exactly a sophisticated service market run by specialists. So I doubt there is much stringent ethical procedures or industry reputations to lean on.
Meanwhile someone copying fobs in Toronto for people was publically shamed, which is silly because anyone can buy an RFID copier on Amazon for $30. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/condo-key-fob-copy-1.4...
Amazingly the building I live in charges $100 for replacement fobs.
I ran into this at college when trying to issue a bunch of keys to club members.
"Laser cut" keys have a second set of teeth inside one of the low spots in the blank that normal machines can't copy. Luckily, the locks that have the bar to fit the inner teeth are expensive and only important things get them so the hardest part of copying the key was convincing the guy at the hardware store that I just needed copies with the same profile and not the inner teeth.
I'm not sure if anyone really follows those labels.
When people's security needs are great enough to justify paying $150+ per lock, high-end locks offer:
(a) Patented keys that the manufacturer only sells to authorized distributors (who are contractually obligated not to cut keys without a key duplication card)
(b) have complex designs that can't be cut on standard key-cutting machines and
(c) have special 'key control' pins that mean different locksmiths get incompatible locks and key blanks.
Needless to say, a sufficiently good 3D scanner & printer (or indeed a sufficiently patient person with a file and a pair of calipers) could bypass these protections.
The blanks that locksmiths have are an optimization in time and cost, usually not in technology, they are there so you can walk out with your new key in 5 minutes and at $10 rather than an hour or two and $200. The trick is that the blank has all the lengthwise grooves pre-cut and the copying grinder then merely has to slot the blank to the required depth and cut off any excess. This is so that some $7 / hour person can make your keys and not a trained machinist with a very expensive piece of gear.
Keys with tricks in them (magnets, embedded RFID chips, bearings, springs and so on) are a lot harder to copy than keys that are simply steel.