Hacker News Reader

Comment by beeker87 | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone else seeing the possible security risk shown in the 'Vision and Face Recognition' section?

The main concern I would have is someone spoofing the visual recognition system with something as crude as photographs, or something more advanced like a mask.

He states in that section, "Once it identifies the person, it checks a list to confirm I'm expecting that person, and if I am then it will let them in and tell me they're here." My first thought is someone could see if there's a friend/acquaintance who routinely visits, and then spoof their face with a mask. Let alone if the system automatically lets Zuckerberg in, then that's all that would be needed.

View on HN

this is a guy who has multiple armed security guards outside hit home 24/7. Plus the fact he almost certainly has staff and assistants who are coming and going from the house. There is no way you make it to the front door if you are not expected, this is just to save his staff from having to use the key or for someone to open the door for them. This would never be secure enough for a normal persons house

> This would never be secure enough for a normal persons house

The Canadians beg to differ ;)

Not the ones in Scarborough.

Could you explain your comment for us? I'd guess that maybe Canadians are known for leaving their homes unlocked??

Even in Sebastopol (about an hour north of SF), (some) people never lock their front door.

For anyone wondering, the name is not a result of a mistake, apparently 'beta' was commonly transliterated as 'b' in the past (as opposed to 'v', the sound that it stands for).[1]

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastopol,_California#History

This is a reference to a scene from the Michael Moore movie Bowling for Columbine, where he is walking in a Canadian neighborhood and just opens the front door of someone's house. I couldn't find a better clip than this one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pjJbtb4Bs0Q

Huh, never lock the door when I'm in the house, except at night ... is that unusual? Live in a smaller UK city. Perhaps if we had anything worth stealing it'd be different.

Is it perhaps the US Americans are the peculiar ones and other countries are more like Canada?

Rather what the hell happened to the guy that had tape on his laptop camera and microphone. Suddenly he's got an always on listening device. How does one go from one to the other?

Somewhere in between he was also the guy who used the password "dadada" for at least two of his online profiles.

Sounds like he knows where the data being recorded is always going and what's being done with it. Pretty different from the chance that a camera/mic on a laptop might be randomly sending data to some third party.

Securing a local network is orders of magnitude easier than a laptop which accesses the internet constantly.

Stick the cameras on a vlan only accessable to the (local) servers doing the face recognition, stick the servers on a vlan that has no direct connection to the internet.

Compare this to a laptop which is connected to the internet with multiple attack vectors (browser, email client, etc...)

Does he have some custom build network router that he trust? Putting tape over your camera means you know enough to not trust the laptop hardware neither the OS or browsers like you said.

But he says: "We use .. Sonos system with Spotify for music, a Samsung TV, a Nest cam for Max". So all of his appliances do get outside. I did a double-take on Nest cam. So he's streaming videos from his house on the internet with a closed source hw and software.

I didn't read the part about Nest to be fair but with some basic network design you can easily segregate networks and reduce your attack surface massively, even if you're using internet connected devices (seperate vlans, use http proxies with ACLs, no inter device communication where not needed).

The difference between a switch and a laptop is that your switch isn't running browsers with 0days found regularly, no malicious JS payloads, no phishing emails.

To exploit a switch you generally need access to the management interface, something anyone who has any experience with networking does not put on the same network (virtual or physical) as laptops, iPads, televisions, or internet connected cameras.

I agree with what you are saying, however tape over the camera means you don't trust the OS or the hardware manufacturer with a console command like modprobe to actually do it's thing and disable the web camera.

There are already many ways of breaking into a house. Also, you're confusing a personal project/hack with a commercial-grade security system.

I think it's just to demonstrate a fun and cool hack. Security wasn't at the forefront here when designing it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com