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

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551 points arrdalan | 2 comments | 30 Nov 24 22:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.453s | 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.

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modeless ◴[01 Dec 24 07:41 UTC] No.42286902[source]▶
I've been wishing for a self hosted alternative to cloud cameras. My house was recently robbed and it was incredibly frustrating to know that criminals were literally in my house but not be able to see them due to the general crappiness of modern big tech software.

Seems silly to pay to upload all my video of my own house to who knows where and struggle to download it back with absurdly sluggish proprietary software when I have perfectly good computers here already. I should be able to check my cameras without waiting 10-30 seconds for loading spinners and I should be able to scrub through time instantly instead of waiting for interminable loading every time I touch the seek control.

What camera hardware are people using for custom setups? Is there anything out there that is wireless but with high quality/security firmware and reasonably priced?

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9dev ◴[01 Dec 24 08:19 UTC] No.42287053[source]▶
So you did have a cloud camera system in place but it didn’t record them, or you don’t have one because all available options are shitty?
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1. modeless ◴[01 Dec 24 08:30 UTC] No.42287098[source]▶
I do (Nest), and it did record them, but the shitty app made it really hard to see what was happening. Takes forever for the app to load, and it can't show all the cameras at once, and tapping into each camera shows another loading spinner, and then seeking through time is frustratingly slow and imprecise. Then there's the split between old cameras in one app and new cameras in another because Google can't be bothered to update old cameras to work with the new app (which is not any better than the old one anyway, worse if anything). It took minutes longer than necessary to get the full picture of what was happening, and when criminals are rifling through your stuff every second matters. Then after the fact it was a huge pain to get the recordings in a form I could archive and share, and there's time pressure because the recordings disappear after just a few days unless manually archived.

OTOH our alarm system (Ring) performed very well.

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2. wkat4242 ◴[01 Dec 24 09:20 UTC] No.42287272[source]▶
Yeah my ring alarm worked well too when my place was broken into. It scared them off, they broke down the door but didn't actually come inside.

Unfortunately that prompted to police to be less than helpful (they considered it vandalism instead of a burglary and didn't even take prints). And because they didn't enter the house my cameras didn't see their faces so I couldn't try to track them down on my own either. But at least my stuff was ok.