I've been building ATLOCK, a desktop security suite for Windows, under my dev banner Akhouri Systems — and v4.0 is the most solid release yet.
ATLOCK started as a simple screen-lock script and has grown into a full local-first security toolkit: lock your PC, guard your files, vault your passwords, and catch anyone snooping — all in one lightweight app with a dark gold-on-black UI.
What's inside v4
⚡ Lockdown System-level screen lock with a countdown timer and OS-level hardening, so you can step away without worrying about wandering hands.
🛡 File Guard This is the part I'm proudest of — it locks files at the Windows NTFS ACL level, not just a UI overlay. A locked file is genuinely unreadable by the OS until you unlock it, not just hidden behind a password screen.
🔑 Password Vault An encrypted store for emails, UPI IDs, and PINs. v4 replaced the old (embarrassingly weak) XOR "encryption" with real Fernet AES + HMAC, and the master password is now derived with PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 at 200,000 iterations with a random salt per install. If you're going to call something a vault, it should actually behave like one.
📸 Intruder Ops Get three or more wrong password attempts, and ATLOCK quietly snaps a photo on the first wrong try and records a short video after repeated failures — straight into your Pictures/Videos folder, plus a local alarm sound.
⚙ Settings Simple toggles for capture behavior and gallery folder location, so you're always in control of what gets recorded and where it's stored.
Security notes from this release
A few things I specifically hardened in v4:
Intruder attempts are masked before they're ever logged — no plaintext password attempts sitting in a file.
Alert credentials are stored encrypted with a machine-bound key.
Desktop notification toasts go through PowerShell safely, with no string-injection risk.
Tech stack
Built with customtkinter for the UI, cryptography (Fernet) for the vault, opencv-python for the camera-based intruder capture, and pywin32 for the low-level Windows ACL work that makes File Guard actually enforce locks at the filesystem level rather than faking it in the app layer.
pip install customtkinter pillow opencv-python cryptography pyinstaller pywin32 numpy
python ATLOCK_v4.py
What's next — ATLOCK v5
I'm currently deep in planning and early development on ATLOCK v5, and it's shaping up to be a much bigger step than a point release. Some of what's on the drawing board:
A premium UI overhaul — deeper theming, refined typography, a proper branded splash screen
Remote intruder alerts via Telegram, so you get a photo/video ping on your phone the moment something looks wrong, not just a local notification
An expanded active security mode that pushes back harder against tampering attempts while a lock is engaged
A bigger capacity for guarded files and vault entries overall
It's still early — no build to share yet and nothing close to a release date — but it's the direction the project is heading, and I wanted to give a glimpse of where ATLOCK is going.
If local-first security tooling interests you, I'd love feedback on v4 — and thoughts on what you'd want to see in v5.
ATLOCK is an Akhouri Systems project, built and maintained by Akhouri Anmol Kumar.
ATLOCK
"We Build What Others Forgot To Fix"
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