Mighton's Avia Smartlock Provides Unparalleled Security with Ezurio's Family of Bluetooth 5 Modules

Introduction: Mighton Brings loT to a Unique Device Class 

As more and more devices become smart devices with internet connectivity, the urgency to keep those devices secure grows. Everything from baby monitors to wearable health trackers provide an increased value to their users by being internet connected. But with that value comes potential new risks, and it's critical that device manufacturers do the complicated and important work of designing with user security at the front of mind. 

Nowhere is security more tangible than in the business of door locks. Mighton is the United Kingdom's oldest sash window hardware specialist, and their wide product portfolio provides customers with thousands of products around high-quality, reliable window and door hardware. Their expertise and services set them apart as the original specialists in their industry. 

Their vision was to create the greatest smart lock in the industry. It would introduce top-notch, highly secure connectivity to a new class of product: the multipoint lock. Multipoint locks provide an increased degree of physical security: when the lock is engaged, a door is affixed at multiple positions, rather than just at the position of the lock. Additional latches are engaged at the top and bottom, making it harder to physically break the lock. 

Mighton's multipoint smart lock would benefit from this added physical security, but it would also need to bring ironclad wireless security to complete their vision. It would need to be easily locked and unlocked via a key fob as well as via smartphone or the web, anywhere in the world. Whatever module was selected for their first wireless product would need to be well-supported, 
well-documented, and easy to integrate and develop. 

The Solution: The BL652 and BL654 Bluetooth 5 Modules 

Mighton selected Bluetooth as the short-range wireless solution for in-home interaction with the lock. Bluetooth's reliable personal area coverage would make it the ideal protocol for controlling locks around the home. 

They ultimately chose Ezurio's BL654 Bluetooth module as the wireless component of their Avia Smart Lock. It provided a stable. well-documented platform for wireless development based on decades of experience in Bluetooth. They developed their application with Nordic's fully comprehensive SDK. And Ezurio's industry-best support team was able and available to help bring the design to life. 

The Avia smart lock was designed with wireless security at the very forefront, and the Bluetooth 5 specification of the BL654 made it easy to integrate the very latest in Bluetooth security into the Avia smart lock. The BL654 leverages Nordic's nRF52840 chipset, the most advanced in their nRF52 line. It incorporates AES-256 encryption with Diffie-Hellman pairing, a highly secure encryption algorithm that is the standard for secure applications such as those used by the military. Its ARM Cryptocell™-310 cryptographic accelerator provides several high-level cryptographic functions that are key to strong wireless security, such as true random number generation, hashing functions, and public key cryptography. 

Additionally, the nRF52840 features an embedded ARM Cortex-M4F microcontroller with generous memory available for application development. With 1MB flash memory and 256K of RAM, the nRF52840 provides a spacious and open platform for developing complex loT applications. 

For their key fob which would control the lock over Bluetooth, Mighton selected Ezurio's BL652 Bluetooth module. The BL652 proved to be a cost-effective complement to the BL654 in the simpler fob component. And because both devices leveraged Nordic chipsets and the Nordic SDK, they were able to build a highly-reusable code base that accelerated their application development.