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Show HN: Open-source private home security camera system (end-to-end encryption)

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551 points arrdalan | 4 comments | 30 Nov 24 22:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.585s | source

I needed a security camera inside my house, one that would send motion notifications to my smartphone and would allow me to livestream remotely. However, I could not find one that I could trust due to privacy concerns. Many of them upload the plaintext of videos to their servers and none is fully open-source as far as I know. Therefore, I decided to use my spare time to build one from scratch. Called Privastead (as in Private Homestead), it uses OpenMLS for end-to-end encryption (between the camera local hub and the smartphone) and is mostly implemented in Rust (except for part of the Android app that is implemented in Kotlin). The system is functional now and I've been using it in my own house for the past couple of weeks.

Based on some of the discussions I've seen online, it seems like there are other users who are also concerned with the privacy implications of home security cameras. Therefore, I decided to open source my solution for everyone to use. If you need a privacy-preserving home security camera, please give it a try and provide feedback. Note that trying out the system requires you to have a supported IP camera, a local machine connected to the IP camera, a server, and an Android smartphone. I have put together detailed instructions on setting up the system, which I hope makes it easier for others to get the system up and running.

In addition, consider contributing to the project. The prototype currently has a lot of limitations: mainly that it has only been tested with one IP camera, only allows the use of one camera, and only supports Android. I'll continue to improve the prototype as time permits, but progress will be much faster if there are other contributors as well.

1. StayTrue ◴[01 Dec 24 02:46 UTC] No.42285740[source]▶
My DIY setup uses cameras on an isolated VLAN that prohibits outbound internet access, RTSP data collected by Frigate[0] with Coral TPU recognition, and alerts via Pushover[1] notifications. My push notifications include an unencrypted thumbnail with a link to Frigate that only works via VPN connection.

Seems like this project offers a lot of what I had to cobble together. Nice work. I like that it offers encrypted notifications although I don’t use Android so not ready for me yet. I don’t like the Google dependency.

[0] https://frigate.video/

[1] https://pushover.net/

replies(3): >>42286313 #>>42287619 #>>42289676 #
2. arrdalan ◴[01 Dec 24 05:03 UTC] No.42286313[source]▶
A fully isolated setup can certainly provide good privacy. A key benefit of Privastead is that it can send the videos to your smartphone remotely using a strong (MLS-based) end-to-end encryption.

Privastead does not currently send thumbnails as part of the notifications. Performing proper end-to-end encryption on data in push notifications is a bit tricky and I haven't solved that yet. I do have some ideas on how to make that happen though. Once I do, I plan to add thumbnails to push notifications as well.

And thanks for the pointer on Pushover. I'll check it out to see if it can be a replacement for Google FCM.

3. ◴[01 Dec 24 10:43 UTC] No.42287619[source]▶
4. bobbob1921 ◴[01 Dec 24 17:55 UTC] No.42289676[source]▶
Excellent set up, and in fact exactly what I’m using / how I’m set up. In addition for a few IOT type sensors and things like thermostats around my house, I have another vlan as well as a dedicated SSID tagged for that vlan, that only allows Internet access and everything else is dropped for that vlan. (Ie a firewall rule on the forward chain that drops anything in on that IOT vlan, that has a destination address of the private ip ranges: ie dst= 10.x or 192.168.x or 172…. anything locally that needs to access those sensors does so through the cloud/Internet, and for the one or two device devices that need to access them locally I have a fw rule allowing just that devices IP