The 3 AM idea
I left my laptop unlocked at a café for four minutes. Came back, nothing was stolen, nothing was even touched — but the paranoia stuck. Every lock screen I'd ever used did exactly one thing: say "no." It never told me who tried.
So I built the lock screen I actually wanted: one that fights back.
Meet ATLOCK — a gold-on-black security suite for Windows, written entirely in Python, that doesn't just deny access. It photographs the person trying to get in, records a 10-second clip if they keep trying, and drops both straight into your gallery like evidence.
What it actually does
ATLOCK isn't a single trick, it's four systems stitched into one dark-mode desktop app:
🔒 Lockdown
A real countdown-based screen lock with OS-level hardening — not a tkinter window you can Alt-F4 your way out of.
🛡 File Guard
This is the part I'm most proud of. Instead of "encrypting" files and hoping nobody finds the key, File Guard drops down to Windows NTFS ACLs — the actual permission layer the OS itself enforces. Lock a file, and it becomes genuinely unreadable at the filesystem level, not just hidden.
🔑 Password Vault
A proper encrypted vault for the stuff you actually need — email logins, UPI PINs, recovery codes:
Fernet (AES-128-CBC + HMAC) for the vault itself
PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 with 200,000 iterations and a random salt for the master password
Nothing rolled by hand, nothing XOR'd and called "encryption"
📸 Intruder Ops — the feature that makes people stop scrolling
Get the password wrong once → your webcam silently snaps a photo. Get it wrong a third or fourth time → it records a 10-second video, fires an alarm, and saves everything straight to your own Pictures/Videos folders.
No cloud upload. No "premium tier" to see your own security footage. It's your camera, your files, your machine.
Why this isn't "just another lock screen" project
Every "screen lock" tutorial on the internet solves the access problem. Almost none solve the accountability problem. ATLOCK treats a wrong password less like an error state and more like an incident — something that deserves a timestamp, a photo, and a masked log entry (attempts are never stored or logged in plaintext, ever).
It's the difference between a lock and a lock with a memory.
The stack, for the curious
customtkinter + tkinter → the gold-on-black UI
opencv-python → camera capture, 10s intruder video
cryptography (Fernet) → AES-128-CBC + HMAC vault encryption
pywin32 / ntsecuritycon → real NTFS ACL-level file locking
pyinstaller → ships as a single .exe
No frameworks doing the heavy lifting for you — the NTFS permission logic, the vault crypto, the camera pipeline, the countdown ring UI, all hand-built in one file you can actually read top to bottom.
Built for hackers, not just users
⭐ Star it if the intruder-photo idea made you grin: https://github.com/Akhouri-Anmol-Kumar/ATLOCK
Built by Akhouri Anmol Kumar under Akhouri Systems.
Windows-first, Python-native, zero cloud dependency.
