Lockitron (YC S09) Lets You Unlock Your Door With Your Phone

http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/13/lockitron-lets-you-unlock-your-door-with-your-phone/

by RyanAmos • 15 years ago

130 99 15 years ago

aberman• 15 years ago

I live with the founders so I've had Lockitron for about a year. in my unbiased opinion: it's absolutely amazing especially if you have a lot of house guests (hacker sleepovers).

busted• 15 years ago

I'd be interested to hear what kind of backups the founders have. My biggest worry would be what do I do if something happens to my phone while I'm out: broken, mugged, or even just the battery died. It would suck if on top of that I couldn't get into my own house. Do you guys still take your keys with you, or keep a spare around?

kapilkale• 15 years ago

I bought one for my father, who tends to be OCD about locked doors, and he absolutely loves it.

Devilboy• 15 years ago

Will this also SMS me whenever someone opens my door? I think I want one.

ccamrobertson6• 15 years ago

We have logging, but alerts are a high priority! If you buy one I will build it for you :)

kordless• 15 years ago

Did someone say logs?

asmithmd12• 15 years ago

How long do the batteries in the lock last?

Can you tell us about the architecture? What kind of wireless link do you use? Does the lock poll the base station? How do you traverse the home firewall? Do you poll continuously?

tomjen32• 15 years ago

Hmm this seems to me even more annoying than keys - why phone is bigger and more difficult to get out of my pocket.

On the other hand the little RFIDs are absolutely awesome to open doors with, try to use them instead (they are cheap enough that it doesn't matter).

yan• 15 years ago

I'm not looking at it that way. Keys are just another thing to keep in your pocket, but your phone is always with you. The way I carry stuff in my pockets, my phone is always more readily available than my keys so taking it out is a natural motion.

You can, however, argue that taking out your phone, launching the app, and clicking a button is as an aggregate action more involved than just inserting and rotating a key. I think the real benefits become apparent when you realize all the stuff this enables you to do: your spouse/friends no longer get locked out, you never have to do the "did I lock it or not?" dance, and if they provide an API, you can sync a lot of stuff when your door opens, like turn on appliances, trigger a network setting, boot your computer, text your friends, anything really.

tomjen32• 15 years ago

Yeah but all of that could be done from a phone if the house was locked with an RFID tag (and they are cheap enough that you can hand them out more or less like candy, since they are about that price).

As for not locking the door, that is definitely a problem (as is, as I have also done, unlocking the door and leaving the keys in it) but I have never really been in doubt that I locked the door, even if I hadn't.

picasso81• 15 years ago

This app is brilliant! Congrats guys.

corin_4• 15 years ago

I love the idea, but I don't think I could trust myself with it. Generally my phone will still have a healthy chunk of battery left at the end of the day, but fairly often, if I'm out of town for a day for meetings or whatever, by the time I'm back home I will have spent so much time on calls that it will have completely drained my battery.

One feature I'd love to see is connecting it with the doorbell, then I would forget about my battery worries and go straight for it. Would come in occasional use for if someone you're happy to let in arrives while you are out, but would also be great for day-to-day use. They press the buzzer, you get a phone call to talk to them followed by the option to let them in or not. (Where I live right now, my office is two floors up, it's pretty rare that I can hear anyone at the door.)

edit: The FAQ page is a bit vague about international orders due to "latency issues", any chance of some expansion on that? To my mind, a long distance (say, UK to California) is adding less than a second of latency, and I wouldn't have any problem if the door took a couple of seconds to unlock. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the problem latency causes?

ccamrobertson6• 15 years ago

You hit it on the head with the latency - although it only adds second or two at max, we want to make sure that we can keep it as short as possible.

That said, we have a couple of international beta testers who seem to have a good experience, so I think that we will reevaluate this soon.

corin_4• 15 years ago

Personally I don't think I'd care if it was a 10 second delay. (It often takes me that long to find the right key to open the door.)

edit: One international issue that has occured to me is the cost of texting a foreign number. Do you have any idea of how many users you'd want to have from a country in order to get a number that's local to them? (And/or is your SMS provider unable to do that?)

wheels2• 15 years ago

Stash an extra charger cable outdoors? I wonder if that could eventually be worked into the product somehow; i.e. a DC current where there's a recessed spot for an adapter...

astrofinch• 15 years ago

Hm, but phones still break a fair amount more often than keys...

tealtan• 15 years ago

Really cool idea, but I think any system like this needs to have a fail-safe option, for when your phone runs out of batteries.

armored• 15 years ago

Uhh, it uses a standard key as a failsafe.

mdolon• 15 years ago

What's the point of unlocking with my phone if I have to carry my key around in case my battery dies?

anateus• 15 years ago

Really killer for things like providing access to Airbnb guests without having to be there.

proee3• 15 years ago

They should add a keypad as well for people without a phone. Keypad code gets set automatically for each Airbnb guest and expires automatically. This of course requies the Airbnb space to have an internet connection.

dandelany• 15 years ago

How many Airbnb users do you expect to not own a mobile phone?

kwis3• 15 years ago

You could do this today with the Schlage system. It allows you to create a number of codes, and supports codes that work only during specified periods of time so a particular guest's keycode would only work for the duration of their stay.

nedwin2• 15 years ago

I was thinking the exact same thing. We just booked in a guest who wants to arrive while I'm at work so this would make life a bit easier.

kwis3• 15 years ago

Schlage has had this for a while. I think their iPhone app has been working for 2+ years.

eps• 15 years ago

And I would guess they have a patent to show for it.

rdl7• 15 years ago

This is great (and would be nice if it did cars and worked with HID office keys, too).

I would be a lot happier with a single RFID tag per user (globally; it could be your phone with NFC, or a $0.05 tag) which could be remotely added or removed from the ACL on doors (use zigbee or even a 3g chipset built into the door; it only updates infrequently).

That way you don't need to pull your phone out in a dark alley and hit a button to unlock the door, and if your Internet connection is down (or power is out), the door can still unlock.

You could hack this up with the Schlage locksets and new firmware.

I guess it's a question of feature prioritization: no keys at all but a clunkier UX with less features, or a single RFID tag with lots of other benefits.

18pfsmt3• 15 years ago

Austrian RFID (ISO 14443) company Legic has had a deal with Schlage for a while. And Swedish lock company Assa Abloy ($B conglomerate) also owns HID (and its numerous subsidiaries), which pretty much dominates RFID-based access control, and has had a solution in place for at least 3 years that I know of.

Edit: Legic is Austrian, not German. Fixed.

Edit 2: I was obsessed with this topic in '06-07 as the RFID startup I worked for struggled to maintain relevance as each use case for RFID proved pathetic ROIs vs existing solutions. I left when it was clear NFC/ payments was the only viable strategy and the startup was unwilling to drop the other verticals and pursue NFC (which is only now about to become viable).

rdl7• 15 years ago

Yeah, the value is in having a decent API, easy self-install lockset for homes and small businesses; HID type stuff is almost always professionally installed, requires wiring to the door, etc. The legic/schlage system has really bad software, and the service is lame, too -- bad enough that I bought one and didn't install it on an exterior door.

I like the hacker aesthetic of lockitron, but want the robustness of the pro stuff too. Although if they do NFC tag reads in the lockset, it wouldn't be too hard to work as a simple internet-programmable RFID lock.

rdl7• 15 years ago

Btw, I'd love to talk to you too (email me at ryan@venona.com if you'd like?) about RFID stuff; I worked for an RFID payment company back in 2003 (ViVoTech, implemented paypass and some loyalty card systems), and I've got some friends who want to set up a hardware lab.

darraghbuckley• 15 years ago

We use one at the office - couldn't be happier with it. Great product!

suhail• 15 years ago

<3 Lockitron

zitterbewegung• 15 years ago

Anyone think this is a bad idea? What if your phone becomes comprised or stolen? Then they have access to your house? Its easier to forge a bunch of bits than a key.

proee3• 15 years ago

Then add a security code to get access to the app.

e1ven• 15 years ago

Not really.. Lock picking, particularly home-locks, isn't very hard at all. Many people attend Lock Picking competitions, and it is a somewhat popular geek-sport.

I'd much have a 4096-bit public key, than a flimsy piece of metal.

code_duck• 15 years ago

What if their servers are down when you come home at 1 am? Outages happen and this would be a pretty sensitive service to that.

proee3• 15 years ago

This is great feature for the fact that you could potentially lock ALL doors in your house at once. For people with 10k square foot house, this could save a lot of footwork before heading out to town.

jessriedel• 15 years ago

I like the idea, but I'm not paying a subscription fee for the doors to my house.

sorbus• 15 years ago

Read the article: "a one time fee of between $295 to $500."

And from their website: "starting at $295 with no monthly fees for our basic service."

nedwin2• 15 years ago

Though if you want the text option it's $5 per month.

palish• 15 years ago

So... What about security?

Would it unlock the door if I captured packets sent by the phone, then replayed them later? (Would that be difficult to do? I've never done it.)

naz• 15 years ago

Presumably they use SSL, so no it isn't vulnerable to replay attacks.

paulgerhardt4• 15 years ago

>>Would it unlock the door if I captured packets sent by the phone, then replayed them later? (Would that be difficult to do? I've never done it.)

The short answer is no. The long answer depends on how many packets you capture. See also: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/ssl/draft02... (Section D.3)

We've gone to great lengths to ensure any additions are pareto-secure.

bsgamble• 15 years ago

Can't wait to buy one of these!

LogicX• 15 years ago

Anyone know if there's a similar internet (wireless?) connected deadbolt with a keypad -- such that you can create multiple valid keycodes on a schedule, and receive logs back regarding accesses?

apperoid• 15 years ago

AFAIK Schlage offers this kind of service.

whereareyou• 15 years ago

Wonderful gadget. Once the hardware evolves into something prettier I am all in! I am excited for a future when my phone, or just simply my presence, unlocks all my doors...especially my car door.

snowmaker• 15 years ago

This the kind of idea that sounds so obvious in retrospect. Now that everyone carries around a phone at all times, bringing a key as well is just redundant. Can't wait to see this get adoption.

ImperatorLunae• 15 years ago

My gut reaction was "this is useless."

Then I actually thought about unlocking my door with my phone. This is a great idea.

christonog• 15 years ago

This works if you need to give friends or family access, but what about taking it one step further by using a finger print scan + security PIN? Trying to fiddle with your phone from your pocket and opening an app or sending a text message can be just as cumbersome as looking for your keys.

extension• 15 years ago

Neat idea, but it seems to me that you absolutely must hide the backup key on your property for this to be safe. There are way too many points of failure between the phone and lock.

Why not have the phone talk to the lock through the local wifi? Or put a wifi/bluetooth radio right in the lock? That should be more dependable and faster. Is that what you are talking about here?

"if you would like to access Lockitron only via your local network, then we welcome you to flash your base-station with a new image that gives you full access to develop as you see fit (coming soon)"

Or, you could communicate via QR code on the screen, using a camera in the door (that doubles as a remote peephole).

Or, you could encode the data as high-frequency sound and use the speaker/mic for two-way comm.

There are all sorts of possibilities that beat going over the internet.

paulgerhardt4• 15 years ago

>>Why not have the phone talk to the lock through the local wifi?

The easy way to do this was susceptible to a number of different attacks so we disabled it. The hard way is being sorted out.

>>Is that what you are talking about here?

Sort of. If you buy the equipment, it's yours to hack...this includes expanding functionality to support eccentric authentication mechanisms. I'll post some stuff to our blog in the coming weeks to give you an idea.

xentronium2• 15 years ago

> While the Lockitron locks do accept traditional keys, the main advantage of using the same technology as found in car key fobs to open your front door is that everything is in the cloud (your data is encrypted).

> main advantage [...] is that everything is in the cloud (your data is encrypted).

What? Someone is trying to feed me buzzword soup again.

codeup• 15 years ago

Buzzword soup yes, but it's oversalted (once again).

I fail to see any advantage in having my front door "keys" stored in the "cloud".

nagrom3• 15 years ago

The advantage is that (theoretically) you can't lose them, you can grant and revoke access permissions at will based on time limitations and you can share them very easily. See other comments on the thread about airbnb for example.

maxklein4• 15 years ago

Another idea that will fail based off the user interface. Keys are too slow. Opening the door with your phone is even slower. I prefer to carry a second faster key than have this in my pocket and then click slide, start the app, wait for it to connect, then open the door.

pclark3• 15 years ago

You are missing that this is not necessarily aimed at regular home owners. Imagine offices, rented accommodation or as a secondary lock for homes. Being able to offer and revoke keys over the air is huge.

This isn't disruptive to household locks, but to the high ticket price door entry systems.

maxklein4• 15 years ago

But then why mobile? Why is it not just a web based app if it's meant to manage a large number of locks? Mobile is not a convenient interface, apart from things that need to be mobile.

tytso• 15 years ago

I'm not that happy that the lock has to communicate with a central server. For one, that adds all sorts of dependencies (the internet, central service, etc. have to be up for the unlock command to work). For another, what if there is a security compromise of the central server?

I'd much rather have a system where the lock uses an NFC sensor and a CPU, and it works with phones that have NFC. Yes, you wouldn't be able to do remote revocation (you'd have to be standing in front of the lock to send an updated CRL), but it would be a lot more secure, and it avoids dependence on a central server.

kleiba• 15 years ago

Cool! Where could I inspect the source code for this?

karlzt• 15 years ago

another good thing is that you don't have to make copies of physical keys.

Lockitron (YC S09) Lets You Unlock Your Door With Your Phone

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