Smart Home Access Control

There are two elements of interest to us when it comes to smart home access control:

The first of these is monitoring access points and knowing whether doors are opened, closed, locked and unlocked. Many people want the peace of mind that comes with (often remotely) knowing if they locked the doors to their home. Knowing if doors are opened or closed is simply a matter of adding the right sensors. Knowing if they are locked is a much harder challenge.

The second is in being able to lock and unlock doors, either automatically or by request. This requires a much greater degree of reliability and security. There are many "smart locks" on the market but many are compromised in terms of physical and network security. You also need to choose one that works with your particular type of door and lock format.

Related common capabilities include our safety and security alarm.

Smart Locks

There are a number of things we look for in a smart lock:

• Very high security from both a physcial and network point of view.
• A lock that can integrate with our contextual smart home and allow all of its (relevant and authenticated) user interfaces to be used to control the lock. This includes things like smartphones using NFC.
• We also require a physical way to operate the lock from inside our home.
• A lock that is not dependent on batteries within it and can work from an external high-availability (protected) power supply.
• A lock that has a clear locked/unocked status indicator (visible from the inside only).

Roles & Permissions

Aside from the physical elements to enabling access control in the smart home, there is also the element of knowing who has permissions to access a space or feature and when. We address this in our contextual smart home by modelling known people and other unknown people.

Auto Unlocking & Locking

We have seen numerous requests in the smart home forums and groups for locks that will automatically unlock based on proximity and/or location, or even based on a schedule. Obviously it depends on personal circumstances but, our research has not found a single case where you would want to automatically unlock your front door based on locaton data. With 2 or more adults in the home, the are just too many error conditions that would leave your home unlocked and vulnerable.

GPS resolution using a smartphone is error prone and a sometimes slow process. The accuracy can also very a lot based on current conditions. In most cases there is also a dependency to share location data with a 3^rd party service provider.

Auto-Locking Algorithm

Auto-locking a smart lock on your front door makes a lot of sense as an additional security measure. You may lock the front door at a set time each night in case you forget. You may also auto-lock the door if it hasn't been opened for a set time period.

Auto-Unlock Algorithm

We are still actively researching algorithms and technology to work out the circumstances where auto-unlocking a front door would make sense.

Even when we are home,