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Comment by Gasp0de | Hacker News Reader

This. It would have been (relatively) easy for Ring to encrypt the video data so that they themselves can't access it. Obviously I don't wish it upon the individuals that use these cameras but I would probably smirk if data gets leaked and Amazon gets sued into the ground.

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E2E encryption is supported with Ring. You have to enable it yourself. Only discovered this a few weeks ago and immediately enabled it [1]

This doesn't protect your PII data though. This is not a good situation at all.

[1] https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360054941511-Unde...

There are also some pretty extreme feature downgrades to enabling it. Main ones for me if I was a customer would be

Limited notifications,.loss of timeline feature, inaccessible on desktop and other non-mobile platform

Definitely some tradeoffs there. I recall going back and forth in my head "I'm paranoid, I don't need to enable this" to "what if there was a breach..".

and well.. here we are.

E2E encryption only protects the data while it is in transmission.

If there is a breach, all of your data is accessible because it is decrypted at the endpoint.

Thats not what E2E encryption means. Encryption during transmission is called transport layer encryption (eg via TLS). E2E (end to end) encryption is encryption where the data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Generally E2E systems only have the keys to decrypt the data on the user's (endpoint) device.

Thanks for your comment. I truly had no idea.

This was very informative and changes my views on a few things.

That said, I'm pretty sure Zoom used your definition of E2E in their marketing so the confusion is warranted.

Run your own camera system with Blue Iris.

That's a nice idea, but Blue Iris in particular, while being affordable and while not requiring a subscription, only runs on Windows. Keeping a Windows system running 24/7 is a whole chore in itself.

Got any suggestions for OSes that are easy to secure and easy to run 24/7?

MotionEyeOS isn’t as easy as a Windows installer and is probably only as secure as you make the rest of your network, but as a main Windows user and occasional *nix, the various guides weren’t too hard to follow and it’s been fairly reliable.

Frigate, optionally with Home Assistant. Exceptionally reliable for the two years I've used it.

I rolled my own system, initially with MotionEye, and then rolled over to Frigate. I appreciate the extra object detection feature in MotionEye, whereas MotionEye really only records on, well, motion. Even with two 720P streams, I'm able to do motion detection and object recognition on an ancient Core2Duo Mac Mini, no TPU.

No data leaves my LAN unless I want it to.

The most painful part of the whole process was the YAML files for Frigate.

They should be required by law to provide offline access to your stream, RTSP or something similar.

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