11–20 of 67 posts
Well, physical locks are not necessary harder to pick lock than electronic locks. Buy your self a pick lock set, practice a bit and be amazed how many locks you can pick.
I’ve been getting into home automation recently and I’ve given myself a rule: nothing cloud connected. If I can’t run it off my local server, I don’t want it. I have much more motivation to secure my home than any company ever will.
Have you found a smart lock that meets your test?
I’ve been getting into home automation recently and I’ve given myself a rule: nothing cloud connected. If I can’t run it off my local server, I don’t want it. I have much more motivation to secure my home than any company ever will.
Have you found a smart lock that meets your test?
I’ve been getting into home automation recently and I’ve given myself a rule: nothing cloud connected. If I can’t run it off my local server, I don’t want it. I have much more motivation to secure my home than any company ever will.
Have you found a smart lock that meets your test?
Losing access to a lock is bad stuff. I went with a smart lock that has a physical key. The article says don't buy a smart-lock, but the convenience of having one-time access codes, scheduled access, delivery access, and linked to a security camera make the downsides (increased attack vectors) something I'm willing to live with.
Inside most modern car keyfobs there is an "emergency" physical key...or should be (recently saw one where the space was empty as the dealer had failed to include it) It's not marked or obvious from the outside of most I have seen and some prying in some innocuous looking seam will be needed. One of those things that seems obvious once you know it but may not have run across.
> DO NOT. Ever. Buy. A smart lock. You’re better off with the “dumb” ones with keys. Well, physical locks are not necessary harder to pick lock than electronic locks. Buy your self a pick lock set, practice a bit and be amazed how many locks you can pick.
Any monkey can buy lock picks and pick a door lock. It's not hard. Generally if you buy a decent rake, it'll open most locks quickly. It's arguably much more work to hack the _smart_ side of a lock than it is to just pick the _dumb_ part.
The caveat here is that smart locks are often "picked" en masse - once you break one in a lab, you can immediately and silently do the same to the rest globally. This is similar to software hacking.
The guidance here should be to only purchase smart locks from vendors that you can trust to patch zero-days quickly. How you qualify a vendor as such is a mystery - I don't know that there's been enough zero days on smart locks to verify.
I just program a few extra codes into the lock ahead of time, and if I need to let someone in in an emergency, I just give them one of my burner codes and delete it when I get home.
I don't really need a log of every entry because the camera pointed at my door already gives me one of those. :)
Note that requiring a server account login before the user is allowed to manage a Bluetooth device is an explicit violation of the App Store Review Guidelines, so now that awareness is being drawn to this lock they may find themselves banned on iOS soon unless they fix it.
I dont think Apple is that hard on this. I peeked a bit the guidelines, couldn't find the section you mentioned.
”(v) Account Sign-In: If your app doesn’t include significant account-based features, let people use it without a log-in.”
> DO NOT. Ever. Buy. A smart lock. You’re better off with the “dumb” ones with keys. Well, physical locks are not necessary harder to pick lock than electronic locks. Buy your self a pick lock set, practice a bit and be amazed how many locks you can pick.
I enjoyed this youtube video of another smart (fingerprint?) lock being broken due to a digital reset. It has a plastic panel on the front where the fingerprint reader is. If you remove the panel with a razor blade (it's just attached with glue), it even has a reset button exposed which resets the fingerprint. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVvEkcN5tW8