Summary · updated 2026-09-16

Huf signed off Phone as a Key as a working system, then patented it as its own.

In 2015 Huf Hülsbeck & Fürst announced a new invention: using a mobile phone as a car key, later productised as Liberkee and Phone as a Key. This site sets out the record of a system with the same architecture, designed by Phillip Shaw and Michael Greaves, shown to Huf from 2012, proved in a joint venture whose Huf-appointed directors signed it off as working in October 2013, and published as UK patent application GB2516939A on 11 February 2015.

Application

GB2516939AAccess authorisation system and secure data communications system

Inventors

Phillip Martin Shaw
Michael James GreavesApplicant: EUS Associates Ltd

Filed · published

7 Aug 2013 · 11 Feb 2015UK Intellectual Property Office

Shown to Huf

March 2012 onwardsConfidentiality agreement 23 May 2012; joint venture with Huf from Jan 2013; proof of concept signed off by Huf 16 Oct 2013

Huf announcement

Feb 2015; Liberkee Nov 2015Huf website, per our record

Huf ownership

Sodecia 30% since May 2025Joint control cleared by the EU, 6 May 2025

What we say happened

Between 2006 and 2011 we designed and validated a system in which a central authenticator verifies a person’s identity, then issues matching one-time tokens to their phone and to an access device such as a vehicle. The phone passes its token to the vehicle over short-range radio; the vehicle checks the match and unlocks. That is the architecture described in GB2516939A, and it is the architecture of a phone-as-a-key product.

From March 2012 the system, then called Secure ID, was shown to Huf through a UK consultancy, L&A Consultants, under a confidentiality agreement whose side document recorded the IP as ours and patent in progress. Huf and L&A formed a joint venture, Huf Secure Mobile Limited, in January 2013 to prove it. On 16 October 2013 Huf’s directors of that company, one of them Sven Gennermann, watched Secure ID demonstrated in London and signed it off as working.

A week later Huf pointed us to Companies House entries showing Michael Greaves as an officer of the software contractor, Spaggetti. He had never been one. Six filings in his name, made without his knowledge using incorrect personal details, were removed by the Registrar on 15 January 2014 as invalid; the annotations are still on the public filing history. In December 2013 Huf removed L&A from the joint venture for dishonesty. In early 2014 Huf nonetheless accepted L&A’s and Spaggetti’s claim to own the IP and stopped paying us. On 22 May 2014 Huf filed its own patent application for a central platform, a phone and a vehicle access unit, naming Mr Gennermann among its inventors. That family is now granted in Europe and the United States. The two documents side by side.

In February 2015, the same month our application was published, Huf announced the technology as its own invention. In November 2015 it launched Liberkee. Huf has since built Phone as a Key into a product line and, in 2025, brought in Sodecia as a strategic shareholder.

Why it matters now

Huf is changing hands. Sodecia took a 30% stake in May 2025 with a stated intention to increase it, and Sodecia’s Rui Monteiro is now Huf’s CEO. Anyone valuing Huf’s connected-access business, its lenders, or its customers has an interest in knowing whether the origin of Phone as a Key is clean. This site exists so that the question is easy to find and easy to check. What to ask, and where the documents are.