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D.I.Y. Home Security
theodp writes "The NYTimes reports that pre-wired home security installations by alarm companies are on the way out. Thanks to wireless window and door sensors and motion detectors, installing and maintaining one's own security system is becoming a do-it-yourself project, with kits available from companies like InGrid and LaserShield. Time to start cranking out some new iPhone and Android apps, kids?"
While most home burglars are not necessarily the most sophisticated, I have read a few reports of the ease of use of hacking the LaserShield. This basically involves breaking the communication between the base unit and sensors, such as by just having a two way radio turned to the same frequency and sending some noise over it to break reception. The base unit does not seem to regularly poll the remote sensors from what I can tell, and so is unaware of a break in communication. Engadget has a video demonstrating the hack here.
While little security is better than none, I still think its important to understand the risks of poorly designed wireless security system devices versus well designed ones or even more conventional wired security system devices.
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99.9% of people that break into homes are stupid. .1% of them are smart enough to figure out commercial security systems. 0% will bother with a custom system.
In this case, security through obscurity is real security.
Could you search for sources of wireless transmissions to find out which doors / windows are armed and which ones aren't?
The ______ Agenda
There are antijamming measures in good wireless systems. Typically the negatives of a wireless system are cost and limited expandability. I got my system here:
http://www.homesecuritystore.com/ezStore123/DTProductZoom.asp?productID=1164
And don't have it hooked up to a monitoring service. Instead it calls up to 3 numbers to alert them of a problem. Overall it cost me about $500 for a medium sized home, but I don't have a monthly bill either. I like my setup a lot. However, some other random things to consider:
- I found out that if you have more than 3 false alarms in a month then the police (NY) will charge you per incident afterward.
- Without a monitoring service there is no insurance discount.
- It's generally not the most foolproof.
- The unit in the link can communicate with X10 devices so you can do some fancy stuff like flashing the house lights when the alarm goes off. I also have the X10 lights controlled to an inexpensive X10 mini-timer that turns the lights on and off during the day to simulate someone being home.
- The unit above is a PITA to setup and can be a little quirky.
I use the system for a couple reasons... at home it gives me a peace of mind that I didn't leave a door open accidentally (like the garage), and I will be alerted of an intruder. While traveling the system will alert me of a possible intruder. I then have a friend go to my house a little while later to re-secure the home. I don't want them confronting an intruder, simply re-locking the door or replacing a broken window. A friend once gave me some good advice...
an intruder will get into your house if they really want to. Simply have your most important stuff with you or better secured (i.e., documents in a bank) and then get replacement cost insurance for the rest.
I'd love to wire my house security system myself. But I have a financial disincentive not to: my homeowners insurance (State Farm) gives me a significant discount for using my local (Bay Alarm) monitoring provider. The insurance discount almost covers the cost of 24/7 monitoring.
Over time I *would* eventually recoup the costs of DIY. But it would take years to break even. And I have no idea how long it would take for the insurance amortizers to figure out the costs of vigilant DIY alarmers vs. happy outsourcers. I can't even hazard a guess which direction those splits would trend towards.
Bottom line: tech is cool; business is challenged; limited mainstream appeal.
No ADT doesn't come in and remove the equipment--that was likely the previous owners--but they're still a scam. You BUY the equipment along with the monitoring. But if you cancel, not only does the monitoring go away--the equipment that you bought NO LONGER WORKS! Unless you can either hack it or sign up with a different monitor, you're screwed. That's just wrong. You should be able to get the use of your equipment with or without their service. It's the alarm that scares the burglar away--they don't know that it's not being monitored. In fact you're probably fine if you just have one of those signs out front that says you have ADT or whatever system.
The other rip-off we discovered here is you have to register your alarm with the police or law enforcement agency in your area. If you don't then they might not respond if the monitoring company calls.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
If you really installed them, you would know for a fact to conserve battery life, they have a long check-in interval for monitored sensors. By the time I opened the door and brought in my tool caddy, etc, I would have had plenty of time to find valuables, disconnect the main box, and leave. Do your homework. A missed signal will take a while to become a trouble report. My alarm's wireless has long check-in's and 3 have to be missed to be a trouble report. For this reason the perimiter is WIRED, not wireless. The frequency of operation is well known by brand, so wireless portion is only used on interiour sensors such as the medicine cabinet (foster kids) and shop cabinets.
The level of security varies by the installed system vunerabilities. Wireless is a weak spot that won't detect short term interferance as an attack. Primary entry points should be wired.
The truth shall set you free!
I'll stick with the dog + firearm approach.
The dog, at 2 years old, is better than any electronic sensor out there. I live in the country, not ultra-remote but far enough away from me neighbors that I couldn't hit their house with a thrown baseball, but he still alerts on things like the meter reader being next door.
I have no idea how he does it, but he'll go ape and 5 minutes later there's a meter reader in my yard.
Criminals aren't generally very smart, but as a rule they tend to pick the easier targets. Stickers on the windows identifying home security systems are just a notice that they need to grab and go. An 80lb. dog staring at them through the window is a signal that maybe the neighbor's place is a better target.
I suppose I could invest in some cameras, but I'm not really too concerned with catching a burglar, just deterring them. If I'm not home and they go into Full Retard mode and decide they want to wrestle with my dog then have at it.
If I am home the dog lets me know when we have possible "visitors" far quicker than any electronics would. I can't put motion sensors in my neighbor's driveway, but the dog picks up on that stuff. I work from home about 80% of the time and it happens almost daily. He sees something like the school bus stop out in front of the house, barks, runs over to me and starts nuzzling me. I look at what he's seeing, pet him, and sometimes hand him a treat.
If it's an unknown person in my driveway I slip a gun onto my belt (if I'm not already wearing one) and I'm usually at the door before they even have a chance to ring the bell. Sure, it isn't typical, but I shoot as a hobby and I'm comfortable keeping loaded firearms handy.
Security has to be multi-layered. We all know that as computer geeks. The best technology in the world can be defeated through social engineering. "Fancy" wireless security systems can be defeated with RF interference. Heck, you might just forget the turn the darned thing on one night.
A dog? You can't really turn that thing off. You'd have to work to train that territorial protection mechanism out of them. That's my alarm system.
Once the alarm goes off, what do you do? Well, you need to identify the threat and deal with it. Manually calling 911 on a cell phone is a good thing to do, as you can describe the nature of the situation far better than any home-brewed security system can.
Beyond that we've got dealing with the actual threat itself, and nothing's better than an old reliable firearm. Personally I keep a Remington 870 Wingmaster w/ an 18.5" Mossberg manufactured cylinder bore barrel topped with rifle sights and 4 rounds of Federal reduced recoil 00 Buck handy at night. During the day I've usually got a S&W 1911SC, Glock 23C, or CZ-RAMI in .40S&W on my belt or a Kel-Tec P3AT nearby if I'm not actually wearing a "real" gun but want something I can clip to my pants in the event of an unexpected visitor at my door.
When it comes to keeping me and mine safe and secure I believe simpler is better and like to stick with older technology. While you're farting around with RF systems and sensors I'll be over here feeding my dog peanut butter flavored treats wen he does his job.
Oh, and for the record my dog is a pet first and foremost. He's here for companionship. Sure, he costs more than an alarm system, but he's worth it. The fact that he's such great asset in security is a side benefit. If there ever comes a day where he's too old to care about that stuff we'll just get another and let this one continue to be a pet.
If you really installed them, you would know for a fact to conserve battery life, they have a long check-in interval for monitored sensors. By the time I opened the door and brought in my tool caddy, etc, I would have had plenty of time to find valuables, disconnect the main box, and leave.
I'm not sure what the state of the art is now, and I suspect that a low-cost system would be pretty poor and you'd be right about the above. However, it need not be the case. In 1987/88 I worked on designing a system that used periodic check-in (or supervisory, which was the term we used) as they all did, but a complete transmission took 110mS including all the preamble and error correction coding in the bitstream. We used 1800 baud MPSK which was considered fast for its time and the bandwidth available to us. The supervisory signal was transmitted every 28 seconds, so duty cycle was 1/256. The quiescent draw of the sensor chip was under 10uA (a very hard figure to achieve, just possible with custom silicon at that time) and I think the transmitter draw was about 40mA when keyed. So the overall current draw was getting on for ~30uA on average. Using a certain 3v lithium cell our battery life was predicted at almost 7 years, though since the project ultimately never saw the light of day, this was never tested in the field. Even requiring several missed supervisories to trigger the alarm (which we did) would mean you still would only have a minute and a half to carry out the burglary - though we used other means to detect deliberate jamming as well which would kick in sooner. It's quite easy to discriminate between a deliberate blocking signal and random short-term interference. Spoofing was also really hard to do because you not only had to spoof a sensor known to the system, but do so with precise timing and correct data format, etc while knocking out the real sensor. Really the purpose of supervisory messages was to detect a sensor going offline for some reason (such as a dead battery, though it would have sent low battery reports for months in advance of that event) rather than detecting jamming. I forget all the details but you could program the response to a missing supervisory anyway - perimeter sensors would trigger an alarm but internal ones typically wouldn't.
While that particular system didn't make it into production, I know that similar ones did, but since my career went in another direction not long after that, I didn't keep up with the industry. I don't know what is common today. I'll say this though, one reason we developed the system was because of the shockingly poor quality of existing radio technology that we'd initially bought in from the US (we were a British company). These systems used an 11 baud (!) data rate in a transmission taking well over a second, with several repeats "just to make sure" (i.e. the redundancy in the bits sent was accomplished by simply sending the message several times rather than using any form of error correction). The modulation was on-off keying so the transmitters had to have incredibly low power to pass any sort of type approval, at least in the UK. The receiver was also a joke - a bandwidth as wide as a barn door, using a super-regenerative design for low cost. Deaf as a post and jammable with the crudest of techniques. If low cost systems today still use anything like this system, I'd say that any security they provide is purely imaginary. Our receiver was deliberately and carefully designed to be very selective, so any jamming signal had to be dead-on frequency or else very, very powerful to overwhelm the front-end. It was also very sensitive so the low power of the sensors was less of a handicap (we were limited to maximum 10mW ERP by law). There again, careful design of the transmitters for low spurious emissions and an efficient modulation scheme and a proper antenna design meant that we could actually put out close to that power and still not cause interference problems ourselves.
No doubt ours was a relatively expensive design but on
Sorry. I'll try to be more clear. If I take a wireless sensor for your alarm and remove the logic but keep the transmitter and transmit garbage, I can mask the real sensor signal while I walk into your house without the alarm box noticing. When your real sensor was supposed to call home to say I'm OK, one or 2 missed reports doesn't cause an alarm. By the time the noise causes enough lost reports, I'll be long gone as the reports not caused by door opening are only a few a day. All that is needed is for preventing the main panel from hearing the door sensor when I open the door. The missing report won't be noticed for up to over an hour.
The truth shall set you free!
Exactly.
The best security system you can buy are surplus ADT signs and stickers off of ebay. install them during the day (take a day off) or if you live in a bad neighborhood, have a buddy come over with a white van and blue coveralls and install them after he comes in to drink beer for 2 hours. Make sure your scumbag neighbors see the service van and some guy installing the signs and stickers.
Now when casing the joint, they see the sticker and go away.
Now the drug induced teenager that was mauled pretty bad by my dog in my living room... the signs did not stop him. A German Shepard excited by the sound of a wailing siren did.
Funny that... if you do a B&E and get mauled by the dog inside, you cant sue and you cant be charged with any crime... but the kids parents did have to pay for all damages including new carpet to get rid of their scumbag kids blood stains.
You want real security? get a BIG german shepard.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"You want real security? get a BIG german shepard."
Couldn't agree more. I grew up with two german shepherds as my dad was a police dog handler and one night we found a particularly stupid burglar huddled in our basement with the two dogs padding around the door. He'd obviously managed to get himself in, saw the dogs and ran for the nearest door (our windowless cellar). Given that they weren't small dogs and it was an old house the creak of the floor boards above the guy as they walked around upstairs simply drove the guy crazy and it took about half hour just to coax the guy out so my dad could arrest him.
Oh and the reason I say he was a stupid burglar? My dad's police dog van was parked on the drive the whole night.
nope. cus he's got cameras and that means stuff inside that is valuable.
The amount of security you have also indicates the amount of stuff you have.
I have cameras, but all hidden and very hard to see if you do not know where to look. I use them as evidence and not a deterrent. and it works. I get my deductible removed from any theft when I gather evidence of the break in.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
>And it's easy to case the joint as the Gas meter reading guy.
I have a story about that. My grandmother was very old, living alone, and didn't believe in banks. When she started to go blind, we started cleaning her house out, throwing away all the junk she'd accumulated, so she didn't break her neck tripping over some horrible thing she'd found in an alley 20 years earlier and saved because she thought she could fix it up. Anyway, one thing we cleaned out was her bedroom, and when we told her, she said we should clean under the bed because she'd stuck some money under there and she wanted to make sure we didn't throw it away. So we removed it and counted it, and I'm just going to say it was, by an order of magnitude, more cash than I've ever seen in my life.
Two weeks later, a guy came to the front door, saying he was from the city water department, and asked her if she could tell him where the water line was, beneath her garden, so she walked out, largely by memory, and pointed out where the water meter pit was, and went back to her house... and found a bunch of things moved. She called the water dept and they said they hadn't sent anyone over.
Having someone lure you away from the house while someone else goes in quickly and burglarizes it is a pretty effective scam. Apparently they hit a bunch of houses in the area doing that.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.