Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/13/matt-blaze-supergenius.html
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I would totally do the same thing if I had one. Seriously who here wouldn’t?
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I agree. who doesn’t want their house key labelled “Secret Volcano Lair”?
boring people, that’s who.
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I would expect this engraving to be used on a high security blank (eg Abloy, Medeco, Multi-Lock, Bowler, or other numbered/restricted distribution blank) as opposed to a “Schlage C” or “Kiwkset KW1.”
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I remember getting keys copied at a locksmith in a college town: “Do you want UNLAWFUL TO DUPLICATE engraved on the copy to match the original?”
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You can reduce any message to a very long sequence of digits, place a decimal point to the left of it, and engrave a notch that percentage of the way along a key. Then the key encoded that message.
All you need is very, very, very, very precise machinery
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Of course for anyone to be able to read the message they’d need to know the length of it (i.e. the precision to which you cut the notch)… and have some very nice calipers.
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Reminds me of the time I shared a fridge with a bunch of other students. My milk was labelled “Botulism Experiment”.
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In the same line of thought, my wifi network is “NSA Surveillance van #42”.
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I own an industrial CNC milling machine, and while it’s not an engraver, it should be able to do it. I’m going to try it this weekend 
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A colleague in a lab I used to work in used to label the solutions she made in Bengali (which none of the rest of us could read) to stop people borrowing them.
Any of her personal stocks of chemicals that were bought, and therefore came with labels, had ‘‘contaminated’’ written on them as soon as they were opened.
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Matt Blaze?
THE Matt Blaze?
Matt “found a writable checksum defect in the Fed’s Clipper encryption chip thereby turning the central key escrow scheme into technogical roadkill” Blaze?
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Did anyone else see ‘cryptographer’ and ‘uses key engraver’ in a headline and immmediately jump to a vision of a cooler and more steam(or something pre-silicon)-punk world than our own; where cryptographers are skilled craftsmen, like the ones you see in advertisements for ludicrously overengineered mechanical watches; and they use delicate and precise tools to cut bespoke elliptic curves for use in cryptographic mechanisms?
Anyone?
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ThatsTheJoke.jpg
Labeling keys is a no no; Opsec 101. Fail.
Irony is real.
Some keys don’t need labels or engravings.
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Like monastery keys…
That would be animal cruelty
<Monk-keys? I’ll show myself out>
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Hence “Sensitive Key Material: Do Not Escrow.”
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We share the same sense of humor it seems. Mine’s “NSA Listening Post #2070”
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