n2oah wrote:Major Boothroyd wrote:Honestly, the alpha spring just seems like a waste. I'm assuming every one of them pushes up the pin to the exact same distance and when that's figured out you might as well just drill a hole into a regular key and that's it.
Like someone else said previously, the alpha spring is simply for patent protection, as well as a "coolness" factor. I guess when you name parts of your lock with Greek letters, it makes your lock sound better.
Although this didn't occur to me earlier, the so-called "alpha spring" does actually serve a purpose other than patent protection. In this particular case, putting in an "active" element in the key like the "alpha spring" in the MT5 provides effective countermeasure against unauthorized key duplication by casting, which is an attack vector that even many high-security locks are still susceptible to. Barry and Han from TOOOL gave an excellent talk on the subject at The Last HOPE.
So yeah, I still think it's a gimmicky addition, and probably one that's prone to break prematurely, but whether or not it was intended, it does make unauthorized key duplication much harder. In fact, due to the design of the spring, you're likely going to screw up the key itself if you try to cast it!
