ShareKey App Will Enable You To Unlock Doors With Your Smartphone

The days of fiddling with your keys at your front door will soon be over, at least if we believe the people who are hard at work trying to come up with a safe algorithm and approach to digitally lock and unlock our doors. The traditional key has long been our most trusted tool to keep ourselves and our homes safe from intruders. New lock innovation is being created as we speak which incorporates our smartphones. The way it’s explained is simply as a proximity lock that is highly encrypted. Suddenly our smartphones would become the one tool for pretty much everything. But the question is, will it be safe enough? That is exactly what the people developing the ShareKey application are trying to solve.

The ShareKey app will enable you to install a digital NFC door lock and open it with highly encrypted key codes sent between the lock and your phone. Furthermore, the researchers and developers of the ShareKey app (Frauenhofer SIT) have implemented a QR code generator that could send an email or an SMS to the person authorized to enter. This will enable that person to unlock the door if nobody is home.

This concept is not new in any way, but the security behind it is what this ShareKey device and app are going to bring to the table. If their algorithm proves to be ultra secure, this could be used on any protected area where keys have long been the only means of opening it. This includes cars, homes, bicycles and safe deposit boxes. There are virtually an unlimited number of things we use today that have locks incorporated into them. Whether or not this ShareKey concept will become a success remains to be seen. Unfortunately, right now, not all smartphones support NFC technology. But the thought of having your smartphone hold the keys to anything you ever need to open is an appealing one. Even if we lose our smartphones, we would no longer have to call a 24/7 locksmith to open our doors. We’d simply ask a friend to download (authorized by us) a time-limited QR code to his or her ShareKey app which would open the door for us. The groundbreaking features and adaptations are, as I said, almost unlimited.

Frauenhofer SIT’s Digital ShareKey Lock App