Whenever end-to-end encryption is not used, scenarios like these are bound to happen eventually.
As far as I know, the only home surveillance products that use E2EE are ones that support HomeKit Secure Video [1].
As far as I know, the only home surveillance products that use E2EE are ones that support HomeKit Secure Video [1].
Maybe... just maybe... technology is not really what should be the core issue here? But we should perhaps look at our policies and legislation? Adding proper liability there will make technology come by itself. The magic of free market doesn't seem to be working here.
The cultural conceit of 'disruptors' is that society has made everything complicated and therefore society is 'ripe for disruption' which if you read between the lines means 'stupid'. Lack of respect means lack of care. Lack of care leads to injury (theirs, and/or ours).
You are right. It's not the tech. It's the arrogance.
From my knothole, legislation comes for things that aren't policing themselves adequately. I think what we are discovering is that there are a lot of domains where the old guard were self-policing to a degree, and the newcomers have absolutely no reverence for anything.
I expect it won't be long before you'll see industries taking a hard look at their internal culture, and then engaging in regulatory capture to keep out the disruptors.
You can create penalties, punishments, hire security guards to watch the door. But the most efficient and effective way is just a lock.
The main, and usually only, real reason for the lock on the door is to serve as a physical symbol which establishes a particular legal status of the property behind the doors, with associated consequences for unlawful entry. The legal apparatus - penalties, punishments - is what deters crime. Lock is an XML tag made of matter.
(The additional, secondary role of a lock is being a trivial inconvenience. Not enough to deter a thief determined to rob your place, but enough for a thief determined to rob a place to skip yours and pick a different one.)
All accesses to customers data should require multiple people not by policy but by mandatory access controls.
The fact that employees could hack their employer is true and not meaningful.
The number willing to commit felonies is less than the number willing to risk termination.
What systems are out there for requiring consensus for access? I know about K of N protocols for hardware cryptography, but I'm fuzzy on such systems for, say, admin functionality or data retrieval. Are they all in-house at this point?
I've found over and over again in my work that it's much easier to spout rhetoric about process change when I have provided tools to facilitate those changes. Maybe it's time for us to collaborate on some tooling in this space.
There are also locks on e.g. cell doors in prisons. Those are pretty essential to the function of the cell, and tend to survive anything prisoners might try to do to them.
There are also locks (specifically, interlocks) on e.g. dam spillways, or on the airlocks on submarines. (For these, the "key" is a button somewhere else that's not necessarily itself secured, but it is still very crucial that they keep things out when that button has not been pushed.) They hold up pretty well—even against malicious infiltrators—mostly because they fail closed and have no UI components mechanically linked to the locking mechanism.
I think the gp is not 'absolutely not true'.. I have a fair amount of hobby interest experience dealing with petty thieves / criminals for the past couple decades; studying them locally and through polls and news articles... stories about locked up thieves admitting they will generally skip houses that have big dogs and security systems for example.
Certainly there are certain types of people to take into consideration from what you are mentioning, and petty criminals vary from locale to locale in significant ways sometimes. From what I understand places like frisco often have car hoppers busting out windows of cars on a regular basis, however in my area they generally only check for doors to be locked or unlocked when choosing to rummage through a car. A portion of the criminals around here will make an exception and bust a window if they see a purse or briefcase, but generally move on to the next without making too much noise, for example.
In most neighborhoods seeing someone crouched down playing with a door lock would attract attention and likely calls to the police. Kicking in a door would also create an amount of noise that brings attention the average criminal does not want to deal with.
Sure if a delivery person has seen you have a box of gold and sapphires next to the door (or notice your vintage guitar collection hanging on the walls while trick or treating) - they may target you with a door kick / other means of juice that is worth the squeeze..
but most of the thieves in my area will skip the locked houses and move to the next softer target. (often ringing the doorbell to see if anyone is home first)
I don't think most petty thieves are willing to learn lock-picking, even though it's easier to learn today than it was 20 years ago.. The added time it takes is not really worth it. (for most in most situations)
It's easier to find a neighbor that has a window air conditioner that can be pushed in with ease (at least around here, this technique in Minnesota may not be used as often)
The only place I can think of in regards to "establishes a particular legal status of the property behind the doors, with associated consequences for unlawful entry." would be Kennesaw, Ga - every person who lives there has a gun - there, the legal status of kicking in a locked door and it's associated consequences are proportionally different than most apartments in NY.
Some of the street thugs know that robbing with tools (that can be labeled burglary tools) carries an extra charge, just like robbing with a loaded gun is different time for the crime of stealing using threat of other force..
I do agree that certain situations / threats make "The additional, secondary role of a lock is being a trivial inconvenience. Not enough to deter a thief determined to rob your place, but enough for a thief determined to rob a place to skip yours and pick a different one." true - but that does not make the above statement absolutely not true.
I think you are both right.
> In most neighborhoods seeing someone crouched down playing with a door lock would attract attention and likely calls to the police.
Not if that someone is wearing a hi-vis safety vest (perhaps with "Cory & Trevor Locksmith Company" or something similar written on it).
My point is that the effectiveness of locks primarily comes from laws and economics, not from their physical properties.
The point I think you were trying to make is that it's mathematically possible to create a cryptographic lock that's inviolable. This is a different way of thinking.
I agree strongly - it's one thing to have a process or rule on what to do, and another to build a system that forces the processes and rules to be followed.
(I say inviolable, but I'm aware you can typically defeat a cryptographic lock by taking a crowbar to the physical locks watched by your Ring doorbell and subsequently using the crowbar on the person whose mind holds the key to said lock...but that's not the lock's fault.)
To destructure the analogy and give a concrete example, if I'm dying of allergic shock I don't want my doctor unable to access my medical history because somebody in the process can't remember how to "break glass" on the encryption on my medical records, even if there's a procedure to do so. I want my records in plain text format and as readable as possible.
All that said, I get your point, but I'm not sure how it applies to this discussion anyway.
- If you normally keep the door locked, unlocking it with the thumb turn is what you do every time anyway
- In cases where there are many people expected to use doors that they're unfamiliar with, it's typically even simpler to exit (panic bar on business fire exits, automatically-unlocking deadbolt on hotel doors, etc)
It's weird, now that I think about it. I was just some kid they hired as a temp. We've never really known who's looking at our private data.
[1] https://community.ui.com/questions/Are-Unifi-Video-streams-e...
Am I wrong about this?
E2E Encryption is usually referenced in messaging applications where the ends are understood to be the two communicating parties, while in this scenario it's a little more nebulous.
Facebook, if I recall correctly, at one point seemed to be trying to redefine the term to be "encrypted on its way to us and then back out again", which IMO is nothing short of propagandizing to confuse people, I assume to foil demand for real E2E encrypted products and gain unearned trust.
I just wish I could read the source code to make sure theory and practice are reasonably congruent.
But as soon as a camera came out that supported this I finally got one (flat out refused to get one before... even though I wanted to get one).
It feels pretty good knowing its stored encrypted in my iCloud and all of the processing happens on my devices (HomePod and Apple TV)
https://forums.wyzecam.com/t/meaning-of-end-to-end-encryptio...
I can always just revert to using an SD card instead of sending my data over to them on the other hand. I am okay with this so far though, they delete videos after 15 days anyway.
I'm also waiting for the outdoor / weather resistant Wyze cams that are set to come out this year, so I can put them facing the front door from the front part of my porch. I hope to have it trigger a Wyze lightbulb, though I'm not sure if they're that smart or if they need the sensor instead.
Edit:
Matter of fact, I have a window next to the Ring where I have a Wyze cam looking outside, but the IR doesn't work through window, so I'm just waiting for the outside Wyze cams to be a thing. Once I get those I might repurpose some of the regular wyze cams to do time lapse videos of the weather from upstairs. Florida has interesting weather.
That's a good idea, I had not thought about that, adding an IR bulb outside. I'm thinking of getting Wyze bulbs for outside though, I'm sick of coming home to complete darkness, just bought the home and there's no smart lights outside yet.
I do need to worry about weather mainly because I do live in Florida, and hurricanes do come through now and then. I will be sure to mount it securely though.
Unless you intend for someone else to oversee your surveillance operation, your footage shouldn't leave your premises unless encrypted, using keys which don't leave your possession. You enter them out-of-band on the device on which you wish to watch remotely.
Is there some implied benefit to not encrypting end-to-end or are they just being lazy and using nothing more than TLS because security isn't really the goal?
But that cannot work with a cloud-based Motion Detection feature (arguably the second most important feature of Ring doorbell cameras, after the doorbell functionality). The Motion Detection is done server side so the server has to be able to see unencrypted video. Maybe if there was a lot more powerful (and programmable) hardware on the camera side you could do it there.
Your wouldn't need anything much more powerful than a Pi4B to do that part for a couple of cams, but I guess this keeps the cost down for a security-unconscious public.