Bitlock replaces your bike key with your phone
bitlock.co
bitlock.co
The major problem with bike locks IMHO is their laughable resistance to brute force physical attacks, e.g. $100 hydraulic cutters. I don't think anyone around here bothers with picking the actual lock.
True in general, but for a time one could pick Kryptonites with a Bic pen.
I'm a cyclist. Why would I want to mess with an electro lock when all I want to do is get on my bike and ride? This seems a symptom of 'an app for everything' syndrome.
1) The good ones are heavy and bulky. 2) They're hard to transport. We're wearing spandex, a lock does not fit in our back pouches and all available mounts on the frame are being used for water bottles or emergency pumps.
This basically means restaurants and coffee shops that have seating outside or allow bikes inside get a ton of business from the bikers in the Bay Area.
Santa Cruz has bike lockers but I think you have to put in a quarter and carry around change. I would love short term storage in the city that can use an app or credit card to unlock and you can choose to extend it with the app. Anyone know of anything like this?
Second, keys are pretty fucking convenient. What exactly is the downside of keys?
Finally, you should disclose that this is your project when commenting on it.
I apologize about that. I kind of assume it was clear but thanks for the reminder.
If you want to share bikes, hand-off of keys will be an issue. With BitLock for example you can share 3 bikes between 10 people. with the app on your phone you can geolocate bikes and lock/unlock easily.
In my personal infrastructure and gear, I like redundancies that create soft modes of failure. The more we make the smartphone into a security hub (or a payment hub), the greater the cost & inconvenience of theft, loss, or damage of the device. Spreading these functions between phone, wallet, and keychain is a healthy "division of labor" that spreads failure risk.
E.G., you can steal my wallet, and you can steal my phone, but I'm still safely biking home from the bar because you didn't steal my keys.
However, yes please to more convenient bike locks. Just not increasing/concentrating device dependency and risk.
The failure case is still terrible and consists of me with a hacksaw at 3am on the side of the road "Stealing" my own bike.
a final note, the battery innovation does not even have to be that much of a breakthrough. if your phone lives for a couple of days on a single charge, then the probability of running out of battery will decrease dramatically (since most people charge at least once every two days).
Feel free to use something like this. It's geeky cool. I've just been burned by things like not being able to contact my ride from the airport, or my phone randomly deciding that it's just too dead to turn on at 8%, that I'm not trusting it for keys to my transportation / apartment.
For those things, if they have battery, like say my apartment combo lock, I want things with a good battery life (in the years) for the whole thing, a good failure state that I will always have on me (a combo), and obvious notification EARLY when the battery is going low.
There will be improvements, but they won't be easy or particularly fast.
edit: Didn't notice you were OP. If I were to use this product and my phone were to die, what could I do?
Also you can apply the same argument to Lockitron. They can grant access to anyone to open your door lock and I believe you have more valuable stuff at your house.
More convenient, perhaps, but now in addition to jamming a pen into the lock or cutting the chain with a pair of cutters (or whatever myriad ways to physically assault the lock that there are) you have to worry about potential software exploits enabling remote entry from anywhere in the world. It seems to me that these things are, practically by design, exponentially less secure than their purely 'analog' counterparts.
My U-Lock key is on my key chain, which is in my pocket. It takes more effort to take out my phone, unlock it, and open the BitLock app.
The lock just does't pop.
I think it would be cool if you could program all these locks to take the same physical kay and then just have to carry one key around. That way, you could lose it all at onc...oh wait, flaw discovered.
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/haamlock-a-smarter-bike-lo... http://www.smartbikelock.com/ http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/social-lock-developers-kit...
I'd be worried that this thing won't handle the weather, especially if its only battery operated (no key).
But if the water freezes inside and prevents the actuator from moving, then the lock won't work. the same can happen to the mechanical locks...if the water gets into the key hole and freezes there or freezes up the locking mechansim
There is an impressive amount of innovation when it comes to stealing bikes as they are low-risk, decent-value targets compared to cars or houses. In the past, attacks that originated with or were popularized on bike locks have paved the way for attacks on other locks that protected cars & electronics.
Except by, you know, sharing the physical key, or having more than one copy, or using more than one lock linked together, etc.
Comparing to the locks in the market in terms of structural security we are well above average. We can't beat Kryptonite New Yorker but we are as good as other Kryptonite U-Locks. Note that every lock in the market can be easily compromised with an angle grinder. The amount of extra (structural) security you get per dollar has a diminishing return. For example, a $60 lock is probably six times more secure than a $10 lock, but $100 lock maybe hardly twice as secure as a $60 lock.
In terms of electronic key security (or keying security), there is no way to hack the lock. Everything is encrypted using 128-AES (access control industry standard). Plus we make sure our keys have are completely random and have maximum entropy. On a side note, I have a PhD on embedded system security, so you can probably on this one. We are also going to send BitLocks to a group of hackers in Germany and challenge them to compromise the security of the locks.
A final note, encryption even the lousy ones are way more secure that the mechanical keying systems. Most locks can be picked by professional lock pickers.
Is there some mechanical interlock so the lock must be unlocked before opening this compartment?
Even though Bruce Schneier could probably break that lock just by looking at it, he's probably not going to become a bike thief.
A. Spend $2 on a bolt cutter.
B. Spend hundreds of dollars on technical equipment in order to potentially be able to unlock a very unusual type of lock that you could have gotten to with option A anyway.
C would be a popular option if this type of lock was common and had vulnerabilities.
As a side note, I have PhD in embedded system security, although most of these things are crypto 101.
Basically, the biggest technical and design challenge was the battery life.
We wanted to make the lock in a way that the user does not have to charge the lock/battery nor has to worry about replacing the battery at least for a couple of years.
To accomplish that, we had to look across all of the components that consume power. On the radio side, bluetooth LE solved that problem for us. Since we are sending data in bursts and the amount of data transferred is so little, the radio power consumption is almost negligible. We also use an ultra low power micro-controller with intelligent power management to low power consumption when the lock is not in use. The biggest power sucker was the mechanical actuation system. So that became more of a mechanical design and engineering problem. Using a solenoid was our of equation. There are extremely inefficient. We design the lock so that the actuator movement is minimal and is driven by a very low power motor. However there was one last issue. Most of the off-the-shelf batteries leak energy and deplete even if you are not using them after a 1-2 years. We are now using an advance lithium battery technology that has a very high energy density as well as very low leakage rate (This technology is commonly used to power sensors in remote sensing and telemetry application)
Eventually when the battery level drops low after a few years, you can notification on your phone and you can then replace the battery.
There were a couple of interesting DEFCON videos I've seen on electronic safes, which are a similar niche, and quite a lot of them were utterly trivial to open.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIJFQO4DIxw is one, trying to find the other, which I vaguely recall was from Barnaby Jack.
a) makes it far less convenient to unlock. Sure, the lock might unlock itself when I'm near it, but then what happens? Does the lock just fall to the ground? Do I still have to remove the lock from my bike? If so, how is this better than a combination lock?
b) makes it impossible to unlock remotely. Sure, it's great that I can tell my friends the exact location of my bike, but what's the purpose of that if I can't unlock it for them from afar? They still need my phone (effectively physical presence) before they can unlock and use my bike. If I had a combination lock, I could just tell them my passcode and they would be off. Why not just a combination lock?
These two problems make it unappetizing for customers. There seem to be a few main reasons why you have a Lockitron: 1) to go through the door without fishing your keys out or fudging with the lock, 2) so you can let other people in when you're not there, and 3) to know when people entered your house. In fact, these are pretty much the exact reasons Lockitron touts on its website: https://lockitron.com/preorder.
If a) and b) are true, most of the above three points have been not been addressed. 1) is a direct result of assumption a), and 2) and 3) are direct results of assumption b).
These problems aren't insurmountable, though. For a), some locks are physically attached to the bike. Here's an example of one: http://lovelybike.blogspot.com/2011/02/is-wheel-lock-useful-.... That way, when you walk up to the bike, it unlocks itself, and when you walk away, it locks itself. There's no need for any physical interaction between you and the lock. For b), you could include a cellular modem [1], which would allow you to remotely unlock your bike. Even more important, however, would be the added benefit of being able to track your bike if it were to be stolen (since with a "cafe lock" like the one I linked above, somebody could very well just carry it off).
1. The problem is trying to find a suitable data plan. The ideal one would be pay per kilobyte, with the SIM lasting forever. Since unlock and location requests take up very little bandwidth, you could pay a small amount, like $10, for a few megabytes. That should be enough for quite a few requests.
Wheel locks are great don’t work everywhere. People don’t consider them safe. The other problem is that they may not be compatible or fit with all kinds of bikes. You don’t to pay for data plan on BitLock. You just need to have internet on your phone.