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551 points arrdalan | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.214s | 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. eth0up ◴[] No.42287212[source]
I appreciate this and will look into it eventually.

Years ago, I used Motion[0] on a pi, laptop and desktop, configured to sftp the motion-activated images to a remote server. I could check the files upon alert and view them in rapid succession as 'video'. It was a clunky setup but worked, aside from the vulnerability of the computers being physically accessible to unwanted visitors - but for this I'd use nohup & physlock to at least prevent quick access.

This relatively free setup had limitations, mostly due to my lack of skills and resources, but it provided significant consolation and I'd bring it with me while traveling, eg using the laptop setup for hotel rooms, etc. The fact that the great Bezosauron et al wasn't involved, did please me.

0. https://motion-project.github.io/