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

(github.com)
551 points arrdalan | 1 comments | 30 Nov 24 22:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | 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. EGreg ◴[01 Dec 24 16:45 UTC] No.42289262[source]▶
A few years ago I wanted to build a self-sovereign home security system for entire communities and HOAs. We spoke to IBM engineers about scanning video at the edge with machine learning models.

I bought cameras that use RTMP and RTSP, and sent them to my developers. From there, it is not a hard task to use WebRTC (which has end-to-end encryption) to stream somewhere. But my use case involved retaining encrypted videos (every minute and every camera would have a different key) and have a well defined protocol for decryption. To me, the issue of security is not just on one end (recording the crimes) but the other end (mass surveillance, aka who watches the watchers?)

Here is a longer write-up I did: https://community.qbix.com/t/balancing-privacy-and-accountab...

If anyone is interested in working on a startup with me and selling to homeowners and gated communities, reach out to greg at the domain qbix.com