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Ask Slashdot: Security Monitoring Company That Accepts VPN Video Feeds?
mache writes: My cousin is finishing up a major remodel of his home in Houston and has installed video cameras for added security. At my suggestion, he wired up all the cameras to be on a separate VLAN that only uses wired Ethernet and has no WiFi access. Since the Houston police will only respond to security alarms if the monitoring company is viewing the crime in progress, he must arrange for the video feed to available to a security monitoring company. I told him that the feed should use VPN or some other encrypted tunneling technique as it travels the Internet to the monitoring company and we proceeded to try and find a company that supported those protocols. No one I have talked to understands the importance of securing a video feed and everyone so far blithely suggests that we just open a port on his home router. Its frustrating to see such willful ignorance about Internet security. Does anyone know of a security monitoring company that we can work with that has a clue?
You want a security company that accepts video feeds where the location is indeterminate. You can't see the potential issues with that?
#DeleteChrome
There is a degree of understanding for why a security company might not want to use your VPN solution; if they have to monitor a lot of customers' cameras then they'd have to have a lot of different VPN clients running that might cause problems when the networks overlap private IP addresses.
Configure your firewall to allow their IP address range to port-translate to the NVR's IP and port(s). ACL-off your security VLAN from your user VLAN(s), and vice-versa, and allow only the correct ports through from your user network(s) to the NVR.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
If those companies want a port open on the router, can you lock the port to only the IP addresses that that company would be using?
That should be fairly standard on most of the firewall/routers available today.
VPN may be too heavy weight a solution. VPN is used when different sites [like branch offices of say a bank in a city] want to appear as though they are co-located in a single site. In this video surveillance use-case, it's just that you need to send the data one-way securely from point A to B. Just using an L7 secure TCP [like ssh tunneling] or using L3 IPsec like protocol should be sufficient. May be there are dedicated devices that do this.. or you may be able to run a script/software in the PC in the home which acts as a middle-man doing this tunneling and sending out of the data to the remote server. Of course the other end should be able to receive and do the necessary decryption.
No, he wants an encrypted tunnel to the security company. Not to a third-parrty proxy.
You and your cousin need to get a life and stop worrying about highly optimizing the design of security systems that have almost no practical value. The reality is for most users, 99.9% of the security value of their system mostly comes from the visual appearance of the camera as a deterrent factor.
I worked with a company called wink streaming that does exactly this, but there are countless... How is this a slashdot post?
Use 3g\4g cellular data.
Wires can be cut.
Why do you need for the alarm company to do something a certain way? Is it not good enough that they do it securely?
What's wrong with a port forward?
Get them to tell you THEIR static IP, and only apply port forwarding from their address to your internal VLAN.
Problem solved.
Have to do it all the time for telephony, CCTV, remote software support, etc. I let them have a port-forward but only if:
a) they give me their source IP (I get the asked the same when I set up VPN's etc. anyway, so everyone does this!)
b) they only get one set of port-fowards to the internal system
c) I reserve the right to cut that connection off for 99.9% of the time until they actually NEED to do something. They ring me up, I open up JUST THAT PORT to JUST THAT IP, then they have to tell me when they are finished.
It makes it much easier to manage, to log, and to control your devices.
Nobody sensible opens up any port to the world unless they have a public-facing service on that port and have secured it properly (e.g. email, web, vpn). But "port-forward" does not mean you let the world into it.
And if the attackers know and can spoof the IP of your remote support, then you're in bigger trouble anyway! That's not the kind of attacker that you're going to be able to easily defend against. But with a plain port-forward, all they'll get (if you've done it properly) is into the VLAN and the cameras, not your systems.
And, guess what. The only device that traverses several VLANs should really be your gateway anyway. There's no point VLANning off and then having everything sit on all the VLANs. So you might as well just have the gateway port-forward and then all the config is on one device.
(Not only that, VPN setup like you suggest is a pain in the arse for most people anyway. If you have a hundred customers, with a hundred VPN's, it quickly becomes stupendous to put them all on 24/7, because of IP subnets stomping over each other and all sorts of confusions. That's before you get into the million-and-one variations of VPN and VPN settings and managing certs and credentials).
The utter and contemptible lack of security for IP security cameras is criminal. No camera or DVR should be accessible form teh internet and no video feed should traverse the internet without encryption. Yet, they all seem to do just that.
My Vera Edge Home Automation System - definitely not a security system - transfers video and all other data between it and the company's central servers within an SSH tunnel. This should be the industry standard.
I'm really hoping that we'll see some options in this thread.
Monitor your own system and call 911 if an alarm is triggered and you see a crime in progress on your camera. If you have the technical ability to set the system up, you surely have the ability to look at your smartphone and respond to an alert.
You should have the Axis security suite or find one of their partners to install it for you, then some company might take you seriously. Once you get that contract, you can specify anything you want and pay accordingly. I've done IPSec lines for some of their customers, but you could be paying $10k/year easily to maintain a few camera recordings which are totally useless in actual protection or prosecution (unless the cops get extremely lucky with an extremely dumb criminal, they won't be looking for that one person or even recognize them when they get arrested on another charge).
But for home or small business, this is laughable, your camera's won't do anything, they will barely be able to see any silhouettes especially at night (unless you buy a $1000 camera, the 100' IR LED cameras all wash out the image due to reflection within the housing, and yes, I have tried a number of them). Your city doesn't require any camera for monitoring by police. You do need a permit and so does your alarm company. Perhaps your alarm company told you that but they are just trying to up sell you their camera system. https://www.houstonburglaralar...
You can do a DIY alarm system with a cheap alarm monitoring service for ~$500 (Honeywell Vista with a few sensors and remotes) and $5-15/month for the monitoring service (wired or wireless). You could hook up ZoneMinder into your Honeywell as well with an RPi or whatever, but make sure you understand the false alarm fees your city levies. Some city codes also require you to hook up at least one wired CO and smoke detector if you do get a system so you should calculate all that in, other codes require wired CO and smoke detectors on every level during renovations.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
HTTPS with PFS should be good enough...
No need to go to the complication and hassle of a VPN.
Pick the provider you want. Then tell them if they want your business, they will comply with your terms.
I certainly understand the need to secure the video, fully encrypted, of my home. But I'd be willing to have it unencrypted, and fully open in fact, during a break-in. It's a big call for help for anyone looking, and it really ought not be that often. And anyone whe'd stage a robbery to see the footage as recon for next time, well, that sounds foolish.
So, while not perfect, why not switch to unencrypted during alarm scenarios?
Holy fuck. The absurdity that goes with American levels of wealth boggles the mind. Why not just not own shit that people want to steal? They are only things. Talk about being held prisoner by ones possessions. Materialism can go too far. This is one example.
Like the whole $110K H1-B thing. Insane. The rest of the world works twice as hard for a tiny fraction of that. I'm sorry, but your levels of consumption are just not sustainable. It will implode, then you will all start shooting each other yelling "I told you so!". Sheesh.
Others have pointed some of these things out but let me spell it out in big letters.
OP started out by telling the security company "I want a VPN." He then came to /. to say to us "where can I find someone that will do a VPN." /. world help you; don't state what you think the solution is and why nobody will do it. There's a good reason they won't -- it's the wrong answer.
The problem is that a VPN is the wrong tool. When you have a problem state the problem and let the
VPNs are used to link separate private networks across a different (public, non-private, or other private) network. That's not what OP needs here.
What OP needs is end to end encryption to ensure the camera video is visible only to the security company -- not the Internet at large.
Some suggestions have been floated by other posters above me, and to summarize they are as follows. Note that the first by itself won't encrypt but any two of these together gurantee both AUTHENTICATION and ENCRYPTION, which is what OP wants.
- IP source address filter. If the connection doesn't come from the security monitoring company it doesn't allow the connection.
- HTTPS encryption with authentication
- IPsec tunneling
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Shocking new evidence proves Donald
Custom worthless crap?
Bwhahaha ... No security company wants to deal with some jackass that thinks they know all about it but was too fucking stupid to think about how it might interoperate before he started and now he's shocked that people have no interest in dealing with him when he walks in the door telling they run their business wrong?
You guys are a joke. You got all wrapped in vlans and no wifi that you forgot that protecting your home was the point ... I'm not sure if that was actually the point or if you guys just wanted to waste a fuckton of money. Your security system was a waste, deal with it
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The Internet people are breaking into things because they have an idea of perfect.
The other guys (the people who want to know that someone is "seeing" it but really will just rely on that word) are just not understanding the protocols and going on what they see.
Nobody can learn what the Internet people (ya real hard I know, routing) know without going through learning it all or talking, and the Internet people don't want to talk to the other guys because the other guys never talked to them. Now it's stupid, just talk.
A bit self-serving as the CTO of the company, but we provide this kind of service to commercial national account customers all of the time. Typically an IPSec VPN tunnel is established between the client site and I-View Now, and the DVR/NVR at the end of the tunnel is monitored for online status every 5 minutes (Which also helps keeps the tunnel alive). When an alarm is triggered, in under 5 seconds, the operator at the central station is viewing both a live feed from the camera associated with the zone that went into alarm, but also a 5-second pre-alarm clip of what actually tripped the alarm. This same video clip is delivered to the end users via a link sent in an SMS message so by the time they receive the call from the alarm company, they are seeing exactly what the operator is looking at as well. i-viewnow.com
Just use a Honeywell Ademco Total Connect 2.0 security panel and be done with it. Alot of central station monitoring companies support total connect 2.0, for verification the system sends 30 seconds of video, 15 sec prior and 15 sec after each alarm device activation. Plus you grt the same notification on your cell phone and have the option to send police.
Just use a Honeywell Ademco Total Connect 2.0 security panel and be done with it. Alot of central station monitoring companies support total connect 2.0, for verification the system sends 30 seconds of video, 15 sec prior and 15 sec after each alarm device activation. Plus you grt the same notification on your cell phone and have the option to send police.
This looks like a security project by a neophyte that's gone horribly wrong after the homeowner has spent a bunch of money. There's a reason security companies install their own gear and make you pay a lot of money. This stuff is NOT as easy as it seems and it seems like the OP is way out of their depths and has given a bunch of bad advice to the homeowner that will end up costing him/her a lot more money to fix.
ADT sells and manages systems like this and they should have been the first people to call in for an estimate, not the geek down the street.
1) HTTPS DVR (authentication, encrypted transit)
2) Lockdown access to IP of security company in firewall
One, Houston police do not require video verification for alarm response. They do, however, require that your alarm permit is up to date, so make sure of that.
And two, you really do NOT want to pay for alarm-company-monitored camers. There's a reason that's a commercial system feature and not a residential one: It really slows down the alarm operator's handling of alarms, and raises costs for the company, which they pass along to the customer.
Even most small businesses don't pay for that feature. Only if they have exceptionally valuable inventory. It's mostly major corporations and government installations that use it. And a few high-cost small businesses like jewelry stores.
If you cousin's really concerned about security, tell him to make sure he has an old fashioned copper plain old landline phone to wire the alarm to, as well as a cellular communicator backup. Either one could go down but the odds of them both going down are very slim.
You do not need a VPN.
Exposing a port is quite a reasonable option. Simply require HTTPs with username/password authentication.
If your server and the monitoring provider both support it, configure the server to require an X.509 client certificate and supply one to the provider. It's unfortunately unlikely that they will support this, though.
If your video server is a horrible insecure piece of garbage that doesn't do HTTPs, or that has a hardcoded secret key that's in 100,000 other servers around the world, proxy the SSL support between it and the router with ngnix or Apache or similar, presenting a sensible SSL interface.
VPNs for each customer are an incredible pain. I'd refuse to consider it too. Most VPN endpoints are buggy horrible pieces of garbage. Clients are awful. Multiplexing them all is horrible, and means someone who successfully attacks the host handling all the VPNs probably gets much more access to your clients' networks than if you just used direct SSL connections.
Do you offer any simple bundles for a tech-savvy home-owner? I.e. 24x7x365 Monitoring of 6 (supported IP) cameras @ $50month - with some sort of clause to protect you from badly configured/false movement cameras?
Your not likely to find that from a residential service. Talk to business class security companies and you'll have traction. Probably won't want to pay for it though. I'd be surprised if you generally found anything in that range for less than $150-200 a month.
Your security companies are not interested in data security, only property security. If they were really concerned with data security, your security devices (eg cameras) would call out TO the security company, just like they used to do when they required phone lines.
More or less what is required to solve this problem is to "keep alive" a connection originated from the home-side (eg on a UPS) and periodically update the status every minute or so. When a monitoring alert is triggered, proactively send the data to the monitoring company (after all that is what they are supposed to be doing.) If the connection is disabled, go over the "expensive" link, eg a GPRS/LTE device with an alert that the main connection has been disabled and send video frames within the expense parameters (eg reduced frame rate or reduced delta-frame resolution.)
Your average monitoring company, again, doesn't care about data security or voyeurs/perverts watching you. Simply knowing the IP address range of your target and the ports used by the security devices is enough for idiot kiddies/perverts to hijack the security monitoring system.
No company will help you to set up a solution specifically for you.
Do it the other way round: Specify that it must be encrypted, ask for offers, and let them suggest HW and SW. If you dont like it, look for another company.
You don't need VPNs and hosting companies. Setup an RTSP proxy between private cam net and internet, give security company public proxy IP.
That's a huge gloss over with the details but it'll point you in the right direction.
SecureCom Wireless has a video solution that supports VPN and video verification. Basically, the cameras automatically tunnel back to the servers using an encrypted VPN protocol. This would make the video solution available to your cousin via his app anytime he likes, and in the event of an alarm it would allow the central station to view the video live for 30 minutes after an alarm, in real-time. So, this would allow your cousin to get video without opening any ports on his home network. Additionally, all communication from the cameras to the SecureCom servers are fully tunneled and encrypted. The the best of my knowledge they are the only one that offers this type of service.
Basically, any if you're looking for that service any DMP dealer can help with that. I would contact Digitial Monitoring Products to find out whose a dealer in the Houston area. http://dmp.com
Cunt.
I work on the Ops side for Alarm.com, a home automation and security company. All of our video connections to customers utilize a VPN. We have over 2.5 Million customers globally and I'm sure we could find a dealer for you to work with. Please go to our site to learn more.
Have you thought about Rogers Smart Home Monitoring? I don't know if their outside oc Canada, but they have pretty good service if you're willing to cough up the dough.
It has nothing ot do with hardware overhead. It has everything to do with overall systemic overhead. Adding encryption is just another layer that can go wrong, needs updating, penetration testing, etc etc. Like i said i take exception to the idea that all this traffic needs to be encrypted by default, not the idea of encryption. Your argument is security through obscurity and nothing more.
So, rather than have an encrypted stream whose software may or may not need updating in the future, you think it's better to have no encryption at all? You are some kind of fucking idiot. Why do you use HTTPS/TLS for your web activities? Is that security through obscurity?
Secure Real-time Protocol(SRTP) already exists and could be used for IP based CCTV video right now. It is currently used for VoIP and video calling and could be used in IP cameras and DVRs just as easily. But, lazy people and fucking morons like you have delayed this inevitability.
Use your head! How is it logical to expose unencrypted DVRs and IP cameras and the IoT to the world without some type of encryption?
I've been using webcams and motion (software) to scp camera snapshots up to my VPS. I want something more standalone (i.e. not requiring an external computer and scripts to run the cameras), but couldn't find *any* IP cameras that upload via sftp. Just lots of ftp and samba.
I was thinking about home security in a Global View, neighbors, energy-backup (thieves may down your power connection), internet supplemented connections (thieves may cut you wired internet connection) , store images (secure place with backup). And then look to secure the internet access to:
- view cameras
- control cameras
- control other house system
-> ssh and OpenVPN could help, you could have encryption and login control, tunneling, profile, have scripts, etc.
Its also good thing create an wifi mesh network (or routed wired) with neighbors using VLan where all security traffic will go.
just some toughs
There are several national providers that are doing just this, viewing CCTV footage before a police dispatch. Your best bet would be to ask your alarm monitoring company if they have affiliated with any of them yet (or why not?). I would expect that within 10-20 years all alarm monitoring will be verified this way and may actually eliminate the need for an alarm system if you configure the video system to report motion. Time will tell how well the public accepts someone who has the ability to view their cameras on demand.