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?

Comments

Re:IPsec or simple ssh like tunneling

[marcansoft]

If the camera is HTTP, just reverse-proxy it with something like nginx into HTTPS, and let it handle basic HTTP authentication. HTTPS should be as secure as most VPNs in practice, and the authentication at the proxy level stops pre-authentication exploits against the camera. Now that Let's Encrypt is a thing you can even get a real cert easily. The security company doesn't have to know that you're doing this; you give them HTTPS URL and off they go.

Get a provider in the commercial space

[guruevi]

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.