20 ms·

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

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]. 1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210538 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210538

mi100hael 7y ago
I don’t know if Ubiquiti’s feeds are streamed encrypted, but at least the recording infra is 100% local and can be accessed locally without any cloud middleman if desires.
- wil421 7y ago
  Best I could find[1] but I think the forum question is about having a NVR in another site with a VPN connection in between the site and camera. [1] https://community.ui.com/questions/Are-Unifi-Video-streams-encrypted-in-transit/f4a26431-ffa9-4a7c-aeef-f0638d21d741 https://community.ui.com/questions/Are-Unifi-Video-streams-e...
izacus 7y ago
These kind of scenarios can happen with workers in government offices, archives and medical institutions as well. And yet the paper documents are not E2E encrypted. 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.
- coralreef 7y ago
  The easiest way to keep someone out is to lock the door. You can create penalties, punishments, hire security guards to watch the door. But the most efficient and effective way is just a lock.
  - jethro_tell 7y ago
    I agree, but I would use the safe analogy instead of door, because locks only keep honest people honest, just like rules.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    That's absolutely not true. Most doors are trivial to pick and as easy to break down. 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.)
    - calimac 7y ago
      You made their point. Accessing an unsecured file and accessing an encrypted secured file with a "lock pick" are two completely different offenses in the eye of the employee when deciding to commit the violation.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - stevenicr 7y ago
      I must disagree, although I find what you are saying an important part of the defenses, and likely a larger issue in certain parts of the country and certain neighborhoods.. 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.
- deogeo 7y ago
  I'm a strong proponent of both approaches. If surveillance infrastructure is in place, and all you have protecting you is law, it only takes one small change, or one warrant, to lose all your privacy (and you won't even find out about it). On the other hand, if the law forbids privacy, technological solutions won't withstand for very long, especially when you can be compelled to hand over your passwords or face jail.
- hinkley 7y ago
  Any problem is easy if you oversimplify it. 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.
- just_myles 7y ago
  I agree, there should be a legislative intervention here. These devices come out semi-regularly with no regard to security.
- thatsenough 7y ago
  This brought back memories of doing data entry for an insurance company as a teenager. I spent eight hours a day transcribing people's names, addresses, SSNs, and medical ailments, including all sorts of sexually transmitted diseases. 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.
giancarlostoro 7y ago
Wyze has End to End encryption for their cloud stuff, or you can save it all on an SD card instead. Wyzecams are also really cheap $20 but they dont have a doorbell, so for now I'm keeping Ring (came with my house) till I see a good alternative.
- wmeredith 7y ago
  How is Ring better than a Wyze cam pointed at your front door? Genuinely curious. I have several Wyze cams but have never interacted with a Ring much other than pushing the bell button at someone else’s house.
  - giancarlostoro 7y ago
    I prefer the Wyze cam all out, but it's already installed so I'm just leaving it there. I don't want to uninstall it until I have a better doorbell device or if theres serious security implications in keeping a Ring device. 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.
    - gnicholas 7y ago
      I also have a Wyze cam on the inside of a window looking out, and you're right that the IR would just reflect in the window, making it useless at night. But I think you can put an IR bulb (or LED array) outside, and just have that light up the area. I'm planning to get an LED array for mine when I have some free time. I also think that you probably don't really need a weather-resistant Wyze cam if it's mounted sufficiently close underneath eaves. Probably depends on how much wind you get in your area though.
JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
Why would end-to-end help when it's the other end that's watching?
- kylec 7y ago
  In this context, "end to end" means being encrypted between the camera and the user's devices they use to watch the camera, with the cloud service acting as an intermediary between the two, and unable to decrypt the data.
- alias_neo 7y ago
  The other end should be you too? 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?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - d1zzy 7y ago
    > The other end should be you too? 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.
    - alias_neo 7y ago
      Makes sense, I thought there would have to be some "good" reason. 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.
    - 7y ago
SilasX 7y ago
Can't wait for (scalable) homomorphic encryption, where providers can serve you without ever knowing what's in your data.
nerdjon 7y ago
I am curious if there are others. 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)
godelski 7y ago
Unless I COMPLETELY misunderstand encryption, E2E encryption only protects your data in transit. It does not mean that data on servers are encrypted NOR does it mean that servers don't have decryption keys to that data if it is encrypted. Am I wrong about this?
- nerdjon 7y ago
  At least in Apple's case, they do not have the keys because it is encrypted by your devices and then uploaded. It is then only able to be read by your devices because they have the keys to un-encrypt it.
  - sneak 7y ago
    The latest Apple platform security doc (fall 2019, available as pdf) does a half-decent job of explaining their key distribution mechanisms (iCloud Keychain, they call it) too. They are doing some pretty complicated stuff under the hood to support multiple devices (trust circles, they call it). I just wish I could read the source code to make sure theory and practice are reasonably congruent.
- orclev 7y ago
  Your confusion is around where the end is in this case. E2E would be encryption from the ring device to your other device being used to view the feed (your cellphone for instance). Part of the difficulty in that case is getting the encryption key securely transferred between the two devices without exposing it to anyone else (a non-trivial problem). Assuming that was done in this case Ring employees would only have access to the encrypted videos with no access to the decryption keys to actually view them. 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.
- smolder 7y ago
  In short, yes, because end-to-end implies only a single producer and consumer have access to the data. Storage in the cloud wouldn't be an "end", and therefore it must be encrypted at that stage. The ends are 1) where the data is created by the device, and 2) wherever it is viewed on retrieval by the end user. While it's in the cloud it's still "in transit". 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.
Wheaties466 7y ago
The only product currently out that supports this is the logitech Circle. https://www.apple.com/ios/home/accessories/#section-camera https://www.apple.com/ios/home/accessories/#section-camera

mi100hael 7y ago

I don’t know if Ubiquiti’s feeds are streamed encrypted, but at least the recording infra is 100% local and can be accessed locally without any cloud middleman if desires.

wil421 7y ago
Best I could find[1] but I think the forum question is about having a NVR in another site with a VPN connection in between the site and camera. [1] https://community.ui.com/questions/Are-Unifi-Video-streams-encrypted-in-transit/f4a26431-ffa9-4a7c-aeef-f0638d21d741 https://community.ui.com/questions/Are-Unifi-Video-streams-e...

izacus 7y ago

These kind of scenarios can happen with workers in government offices, archives and medical institutions as well. And yet the paper documents are not E2E encrypted. 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.

coralreef 7y ago
The easiest way to keep someone out is to lock the door. You can create penalties, punishments, hire security guards to watch the door. But the most efficient and effective way is just a lock.
- jethro_tell 7y ago
  I agree, but I would use the safe analogy instead of door, because locks only keep honest people honest, just like rules.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  That's absolutely not true. Most doors are trivial to pick and as easy to break down. 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.)
  - calimac 7y ago
    You made their point. Accessing an unsecured file and accessing an encrypted secured file with a "lock pick" are two completely different offenses in the eye of the employee when deciding to commit the violation.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - stevenicr 7y ago
    I must disagree, although I find what you are saying an important part of the defenses, and likely a larger issue in certain parts of the country and certain neighborhoods.. 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.
deogeo 7y ago
I'm a strong proponent of both approaches. If surveillance infrastructure is in place, and all you have protecting you is law, it only takes one small change, or one warrant, to lose all your privacy (and you won't even find out about it). On the other hand, if the law forbids privacy, technological solutions won't withstand for very long, especially when you can be compelled to hand over your passwords or face jail.
hinkley 7y ago
Any problem is easy if you oversimplify it. 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.
just_myles 7y ago
I agree, there should be a legislative intervention here. These devices come out semi-regularly with no regard to security.
thatsenough 7y ago
This brought back memories of doing data entry for an insurance company as a teenager. I spent eight hours a day transcribing people's names, addresses, SSNs, and medical ailments, including all sorts of sexually transmitted diseases. 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.

giancarlostoro 7y ago

Wyze has End to End encryption for their cloud stuff, or you can save it all on an SD card instead. Wyzecams are also really cheap $20 but they dont have a doorbell, so for now I'm keeping Ring (came with my house) till I see a good alternative.

wmeredith 7y ago
How is Ring better than a Wyze cam pointed at your front door? Genuinely curious. I have several Wyze cams but have never interacted with a Ring much other than pushing the bell button at someone else’s house.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  I prefer the Wyze cam all out, but it's already installed so I'm just leaving it there. I don't want to uninstall it until I have a better doorbell device or if theres serious security implications in keeping a Ring device. 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.
  - gnicholas 7y ago
    I also have a Wyze cam on the inside of a window looking out, and you're right that the IR would just reflect in the window, making it useless at night. But I think you can put an IR bulb (or LED array) outside, and just have that light up the area. I'm planning to get an LED array for mine when I have some free time. I also think that you probably don't really need a weather-resistant Wyze cam if it's mounted sufficiently close underneath eaves. Probably depends on how much wind you get in your area though.

JackRabbitSlim 7y ago

Why would end-to-end help when it's the other end that's watching?

kylec 7y ago
In this context, "end to end" means being encrypted between the camera and the user's devices they use to watch the camera, with the cloud service acting as an intermediary between the two, and unable to decrypt the data.
alias_neo 7y ago
The other end should be you too? 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?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- d1zzy 7y ago
  > The other end should be you too? 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.
  - alias_neo 7y ago
    Makes sense, I thought there would have to be some "good" reason. 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.
  - 7y ago

SilasX 7y ago

Can't wait for (scalable) homomorphic encryption, where providers can serve you without ever knowing what's in your data.

nerdjon 7y ago

I am curious if there are others. 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)

godelski 7y ago

Unless I COMPLETELY misunderstand encryption, E2E encryption only protects your data in transit. It does not mean that data on servers are encrypted NOR does it mean that servers don't have decryption keys to that data if it is encrypted. Am I wrong about this?

nerdjon 7y ago
At least in Apple's case, they do not have the keys because it is encrypted by your devices and then uploaded. It is then only able to be read by your devices because they have the keys to un-encrypt it.
- sneak 7y ago
  The latest Apple platform security doc (fall 2019, available as pdf) does a half-decent job of explaining their key distribution mechanisms (iCloud Keychain, they call it) too. They are doing some pretty complicated stuff under the hood to support multiple devices (trust circles, they call it). I just wish I could read the source code to make sure theory and practice are reasonably congruent.
orclev 7y ago
Your confusion is around where the end is in this case. E2E would be encryption from the ring device to your other device being used to view the feed (your cellphone for instance). Part of the difficulty in that case is getting the encryption key securely transferred between the two devices without exposing it to anyone else (a non-trivial problem). Assuming that was done in this case Ring employees would only have access to the encrypted videos with no access to the decryption keys to actually view them. 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.
smolder 7y ago
In short, yes, because end-to-end implies only a single producer and consumer have access to the data. Storage in the cloud wouldn't be an "end", and therefore it must be encrypted at that stage. The ends are 1) where the data is created by the device, and 2) wherever it is viewed on retrieval by the end user. While it's in the cloud it's still "in transit". 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.

Wheaties466 7y ago

The only product currently out that supports this is the logitech Circle. https://www.apple.com/ios/home/accessories/#section-camera https://www.apple.com/ios/home/accessories/#section-camera