Worthy thread to ask: is there such a thing as a white label IP camera (or similar) with a supported open firmware? Not asking for open source, but something close to plug and play that nonetheless has a way of stripping the rootfs as desired for bespoke use in a manufacturer-supported way.
I have looked around before but I only found genuinely dev-oriented kits that weren't even in a shell, and crazy priced.
Not exactly open firmware, but something like ONVIF on an isolated network is pretty close. An ONVIF camera should talk to basically any NVR (network video recorder), there are several open-source ones available.
There are tons of ONVIF-compliant and cheap PoE cameras, and with this setup you really don't care about the security of the manufacturer firmware since you aren't exposing them to the network publicly. However, you do need to be extra diligent when configuring your VLAN/network segmentation.
Getting this right is hard, speaking as someone who has ARP poisoned an exposed ethernet connected to some cheap switches to monitor cameras in whole buildings before. The problem is the endpoint itself, adding layers on top doesn't solve things. Ideally I'd like a device that could be connected to public wifi and still be robust. For example including padding any data it's transmitting to avoid observable compression side effects being usable as a proxy for motion detection (which is a cool trick you can try even without a working wifi key)
For anyone who wants a setup like this but the nice notifications and quality of life capabilities (recordings, easy remote access for family), and are ok being on Apple infra (end to end encrypted) -
ONVIF camera (or one compatible with Scrypted)
Block WAN (ideally, VLAN) on the cheap cameras
Home computer to run Scrypted
AppleTV (for Apple home bridge)
This is what I moved to after getting away from Ring and it works quite well. Reolink cams, old desktop, and an hour of setup.
There is also https://thingino.com/ which has a clear set of supported cameras. The installation is straight forward if you choose a cam with SD-Card flashing support. I upgraded two of the Sonoff Slim Gen2 without any issues.
I found Thingino to be very buggy and frustrating to use despite using 2 different supported cameras. The stream would constantly drop out, services would sometimes crash and wouldn't get automatically restarted. I tried tweaking all available parameters, resetting, updating but eventually I just gave up (a few months ago).
Not exactly what you have asked for, but ESP32 based M5Stack and Seeed Xiao modules might fit the bill. They are not so expensive, are Linux-free, and there's no report so far of secret ping home features in the SDK.
Would it be so difficult to include a simple plastic case? Having to find/design 3D printed cases adds time to getting these projects set up. I don’t have a 3D printer and have to go to the local maker space to make anything.
Yeah, this does seem like a needless omission. Cardboard cases work sometimes. Plastic cases aren't too hard to find, but they do require modifications.
I was working with Raspberry Pis, starting with a college honors project, around 2018.
For a while, I thought about building a network of surveillance cameras around the interior of my home. The Raspberry Pi seemed like a tempting platform to hook up a bunch of cameras to it. Sadly, I could not find a backend surveillance app or system that was suitable for running such a network. The best one I found was some kind of modular Linux app that was for-pay, and actually seemed based in Russia or something, and personally I wasn't comfortable about handing over my domestic surveillance needs to Russia!
I also considered exterior sensors, such as a camera, or perhaps a nice little weather station, outside on my balcony, running on the little Raspberry Pi.
Then I recalled two things: I live in the Sonoran Desert, where the desert highs can go up around 115℉, and any plant on my balcony was guaranteed to wither and die, not to mention the blowing dust and thunderstorms we have.
I determined that there was basically no way to house or protect a Raspberry Pi, as well as supply it with connectivity and electric power, and keep it outside on the balcony in conditions where I'd benefit from those active sensors. Sad but true!
As an — I am guessing — American, you should feel more comfortable with handing over your domestic surveillance to Russia or China than to a US-based company. They absolutely have no interest in your domestic matters, nor do they have a clear path to monetize your attention.
There are non-IP cameras and coax interfaces, which would expose a USB video device on any Linux system, RPi included.
Plenty of software to handle that, though don't know what's the state of the art.
> They absolutely have no interest in your domestic matters
This is categorically, not true, I'm afraid. Reaching into domestic networks, where you can find influential people through mass harvesting, is an actively exploited technique by the spy agencies of our world.
How do you find the gardener of someone influential? You target all gardeners.
We are talking here about someone at least technically savvy who would know if they are of interest or not (ok, maybe not). They'd also be able to monitor their outgoing traffic.
We are also not talking about a potential Russian product that will reach into large number of homes since — being paid and privacy focused — it is already a niche product. So getting into someone's home of interest would need a lot of luck, and there are probably better ways to do it.
> As an — I am guessing — American, you should feel more comfortable with handing over your domestic surveillance to Russia or China than to a US-based company. They absolutely have no interest in your domestic matters, nor do they have a clear path to monetize your attention.
Unfortunately, that isn't exactly true. Sure, they don't have any usage for your porch camera and its data, but the fact that it is hooked up to an IP classified as "US residential" or "US small-business" is the valuable thing. DDoS nodes, "residential IP proxy" malware or running botnet campaigns all benefit from a high bandwidth connection that is 99% not getting flagged in any list.
That is certainly a different matter: "handing over domestic surveillance" vs enabling a foreign company to run a node on your network.
However, that is mostly about trusting or not trusting someone's business. Eg. DJI drones and action cams and gimbals are omnipresent, and they have the potential to do the same when it comes to China.
But they also have plenty to gain from building a great product and selling it and not reselling your IP addresses.
I so want these to be a viable solution but man my experience so far is that it can barely be made to work and only in the most favorable environments. Compare that to the blink cameras I used to run outside where it occasionally went below -20F and they still went over a year on a couple batteries.
I wish...
The best I've found is https://openipc.org/ which is a very manufacturer unsupported way of reflashing certain chips with open-source firmware. It seems very fiddly as only certain SoCs are supported and good luck finding out if a specific Chinese camera has one.
I do know of at least one company who has black-holed the entire DoD ip space and are using it for internal space, which is why I gave a speculation warning... it's really strange regardless.
I recently troubleshot an installation for someone where at some point in the past they'd picked 1.1.1.0/24 as their address range because "all that 192 stuff was silly and too complicated".
You know, I'm not sure I can explain how I feel about this properly without waving the shotgun around.
I had a gig for a contractor of some banks once. One of the banks was using 5.0.0.0/8 internally. I asked the guy if it doesn't lead to issues. All the time, he said. When they first came in, they just assigned each bank 1.0.0.0/8, 2.0.0.0/8, and so on. Number ten feels really lucky, he said.
As long as it's strictly separated from the internet it works. The Internetwork Packet Exchange, used for cellular roaming, is a parallel global internet with its own addresses and allocation policies.
LOL, they should have just used a 10.x space instead if they wanted slightly simpler numbers.
On the shotgun, or adjacent, I do tend to prefer ammo classes for my nets... 10.22.x.y, where x may be 1, 38, 45, etc. Allows for site to site vpn with friends/family a bit easier to remember.
I dunno, seems like it could be a bit vague. Does 45 refer to 45 Webley or 45 GAP? Could possibly also refer to 45 Colt I guess, if you're boring. But 45 Colt, 45 ACP, 45 Colt Government?
Also, just in case this comment isn't pedantic enough, 10.22 would be a firearm range, not an ammo range. And AFAIK they only ever chambered that for .22 rimfire cartridges. ;)
I got a "home" Verizon box, and the first thing I did was change the DNS setting... 1.1.1.1 wasn't working, and I wanted to change it back to default. Verizon's tech support are idiots... they literally wouldn't give me the default DNS IP because they were concerned about security.
Google's DNS worked fine, but Cloudflare's didn't. No idea if they ever fixed it... I'm using it as a backup for my main connection, eventually I'll setup autofailover on my router (OpnSense). For now, I just swap the cables.
Quantenna used 1.1.1.1 for RPC to their wifi chip in their SDK by default. Should not have been exposed to global routing but of course people screwed that up.
My ISP won't give me the router credentials because they claim that that would somehow risk their network interconnectivity or something. I have no idea how this makes any sense since a router (shouldn't) give me that level of access, but maybe I'm missing something?
Sounds like someones on the path to sovereign citizenship. I can't wait for our cyber-sovereign citizenships who deny various IP ranges coming from the government's domain naming system.
Yet another thing ipv6 solves. Yeah you can do the officially supported fdXX:XXXX:XXXX:... but you can also just pick something like 1::1 and it's unlikely to conflict with the current global range.
If you're gonna do that, though, it's better if you use fd00:... or one of the other assigned ranges so it's still in the standard range. OSes use this as a heuristic for source address selection.
> Yet another thing ipv6 solves. ... it's unlikely to conflict with the current global range
I'm not familiar with IPv6's details, could you elaborate on this? To me, this reads like you're saying that IPv6 solves the problem by having low adoption rates rather than an actual function of the protocol.
All global IPv6 addresses start with 2. This is by design. Pedantically, 3 is also reserved for global. Some other prefixes are also reserved, like fd for the ULA (local) range.
The point of IPv6 was to make the addresses so long they are easy to manage.
Respectfully I don't think they explained it well.
fc00::/7 is for "Unique Local Addresses". Basically, private, non-globally-routable addresses from which you can freely pick space. Kind of like RFC1918. It's deliberately huge and you should only use as much from it as you need. The idea being that if you merge with another organization or connect to them via VPN, it's unlikely your addresses will collide like with RFC 1918.
There's even a website (sites?) to register your ULA space on a volunteer basis to reduce collision chances.
No need to mess around with setting up DHCP, remembering if your router is top or bottom of the subnet, and if you want 500 devices on a single subnet that's no problem.
Now if you still need ipv4 then yes, ipv6 is stupid as you have double the pain for none of the gain, but if you are ip6 only then its far easier.
Agreed 100%! I know there's tough challenges to making this reality, but if https://serverspace.io/about/blog/ipv8-explained-what-we-kno... could be an IRL thing, I would buy company network equipment and use computer OSes that supported this draft standard.
It's a much better compromise and ergonomics to migrate from IPv4 to an IPv4 respecting successor, where IPv6 is just the academic snobbery and utterly alien mental model for not-enough benefits.
For the same reason Unix stuck around and beat up its own successor Plan 9/inferno. That inertia even decades later is the same reason IPv4 still beats IPv6.
Interesting -- seems like the side effect would be to basically prevent use by the DoD but not really anyone else. Bonus points if they sell a "government" version for higher cost
I also know of a company who does this. The reason in their case is they act as a network concentrator, bridging hundreds of client IP spaces, so this helps them avoid conflicts with their own space without having to NAT constantly. There is still a lot of NAT for the more common ranges.
The fact that the network concentrator co uses DoD v4 address space to avoid conflicts implies that their clients are bringing v4 addresses, so IPv6 is utterly irrelevant in this situation.
I don't remember which but one of the major US cellular networks was using the DoDs 7.0.0.0/8 internally. It was never an issue since the DoD kept that /8 offline but the IPs would show up in traceroutes. I had to tell many people to ignore it.
I used to work somewhere that did that. Several of us in Eng pointed out that it was likely impossible to sell anything to DoD personnel since the reply would route internally. But I don't know if it was _fixed_, was still an issue when I left.
there's a couple subnets I (ab)use in the DOD IP space for my home network knowing they'd never put them on the open internet. it's also fun to throw logging for a loop if someone digs.
>the entirety of 10/8 and 172.16/12 and 192.168/16 wasn't large enough for your house?
Just to chime in agreeing with sibling comments, the issue is when it's not about just your house and you're deep into self-hosted stuff with a lot of different properties and businesses other people's houses all sharing resources. Without a lot of coordination and consideration, which in practice doesn't really happen easily given the adhoc nature such things tend to organically develop out of, and all the random stuff that wants specific addresses at least for setup, it actually gets pretty easy to run into collisions. Allocations typically are definitely inefficient in many respects but also made sense in the context they were first done and of course can be a certain amount of effort to change.
In an ideal world I sorta feel like "IPv6" should have been more along the lines of <12 octet prefix>:<IPv4>, everyone gets a prefix or set of prefixes that they actually own and are consistent worldwide, or at least only change when geographic location changes, and then can just have the entire 32-bit IPv4 space for LAN however they want. Then you only have to care about prefix between LANs and it could all be extremely automated, internally you only need to use something that looks like IPv4 with the network hardware transparently able to handle prefixes for WAN. Backwards compatibility story would be a lot more straight forward too. Oh well.
@kotaKat: that's a great idea and I don't know why I forgot I played with that like 15 years ago. Really handy as a backup space that almost certainly won't collide with any commercial hardware at least.
I work for a large organisation that has various blocks scattered around 10./8, some with highish values for the second octet and some with lowish values, so say 10.129.0.x/24 and 10.3.0.x/24 to pick just two out of a couple of thousand.
But one of our vendor networks uses 10.32.x.x/32 for various radio gateways, and the radios themselves all locally expose (this is where I give away too big a clue as to what I do) 10.0.0.101 as a management address that emits important link status data.
So you can imagine what a godawful bùrach everyone's routing tables are.
i deal with a lot of nerds that are all interconnected with one another and nobody can agree on a common subnet for their houses when we all decide to exchange routes internally. ;)
I deal with a lot of nerds, but starting in about 2008 we all segmented up the 10.x space and each of us has a /16, with each site we manage having typically a /24 or /22, so nobody overlaps. We can light up tunnels between each other and never have a collision. We have a little internal registry on a private wiki, and it's been serving us well for... oh dear, almost two decades now.
Crucially, we set aside the common 10.1 and 10.10 ranges as nonroutable, so any devices that default into those have to be dealt with before they can live on the wider network.
Newcomers get handed a block and have to renumber, or NAT into it, or whatever, but they cannot emit bogons. At a small scale (first-name basis), this works.
The CGNAT space (100.64.0.0/10) is also free real estate for container virtual/overlay networks when you don't want to (or can't, thanks to IT) use the RFC-1918 subnets.
n.b., it's the Department of Defense, just like the Kennedy Center doesn't have Trump's name attached, and the large body of water by Texas is the Gulf of Mexico.
just buy stuff you can put your own firmware/os on because it's either just the worst security in the world (aka anything not from china) or, well... china.
and while i currently don't hate china as much as i do US rn (because canadian; sorry) i can also say -- due to being an aforementioned leaflandian -- that due to very personal experience i have zero faith in anything from china that has the ability to connect to any type of network :')
And so yeah at this point if I can't at the very least get a whatever-wrt firmware (preferably a proper linux distro nowadays; not to say the *-wrt firmwares aren't a real OS but, y'know) on the device i just avoid them entirely since, well... it's all i can do at this point because even if there were baked in hardware-based backdoors i as an individual can't do much more than that.
It's not quite ideal hardware due to only having a single NIC, but you can slap a USB NIC on it and make it work, if that's what's handy.
Old thin clients are typically in the same hardware class, and probably cheaper by the time you add the exploding MSRP of a Pi, and a PSU, and a case and heatsink, and maybe some storage that doesn't suck ass. But if you already own the Pi, yeah, go for it.
Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don’t recognize
Not surprised, many of these vendors are doing crazy things, insane defaults, broken security, hardcoded values. Security is not a priority, I get that, but at the very least some baseline check would be nice (no hardcoded credentials for starting)
There's also some irony in people happily ignoring that so many of these products live-stream the inside view of their homes and offices to some foreign corporate cloud - and in the case of suspiciously many Chinese security cameras, a state-backed corporation's cloud. Because, wow, it really is convenient.
Which is exactly why alll my cameras live in their own VLAN with no internet access, regardless of how trustworthy the company may be. Better safe than sorry and all that.
I bought some ambient room lighting recently. You cannot control them without a proprietary app. This bugged me ... so I grabbed an APK from the Google store, unpacked it, and found essentially keys to the kingdom: api keys for the backend, api keys for shopify, etc. Haven't done anything with this knowledge yet.
Just as a pedantic aside, people often use Venn diagram when they mean Euler diagram. A Venn diagram always has the overlapping circles and use shading or labeling describe the set relation. Euler diagrams let the circles describe the relation so two non intersecting sets in a Venn diagram might share the left circle green, the right blue and leave the intersection blank or grey. An Euler diagram will have two disjoint circles.
> Anyone who cares about security will be using App Attest or the Google store equivalent.
Why? I rarely have security objectives where remote attention would help, and it has a huge impact on user freedom. For B2C attestation is just an evil captcha.
Have you actually tried to do anything with them though? The keys are in there, but may not grant you any real extra access beyond what your user is actually allowed to do via the app.
It is still pretty nice, you don't have to install yet another app to do something. People did this with Mazda app as it allowed them to start the car without subscription. They 'fixed' it.
Another rule of thumb - i know it's not always the best since some products are really nice aesthetically - is to buy only local smart stuff, for example, zigbee/zwave.
I live by this rule*. Being able to pick up stuff from IKEA that's well supported, well designed and really affordable is a huge advantage.
*almost, I have two things that need an app. My Vaillant boiler and my Yale alarm system. Both apps are terrible, but I have a 10 year warranty on the boiler and my alarm is up to scratch from a home insurance point of view.**
Ugh, that's a new low. I can't think of a single good reason a lighting app would need shopify api access.
That said, I've done some consulting work on shopify stores, and I wouldn't be shocked at all to see something like that at all. The bar for code quality that a lot of low end consultants/designers deliver is just abysmal.
In many cases it is bad to publish this info because they might come after you. There used to be a company who shielded the “researcher” from the legal consequences, can’t remember the name though.
buy any dongle that sells for under $100 on amazon. they all have the same mac, and come with 'bespoke' apps to let you do things to your car. those apps are all thin wrappers on code widely shared; they use the MAC of the dongle as the keystone for ID.
Short story: buy one cheap dongle on Amazon, dump the MAC (00:11:22:AA:BB:CC IIRC; it's been 15 years since I cared) and you have auth to all of the apps everywhere.
Reminder: the Bluetooth logo comes, mostly, from self-certification.
I bought 3 from 3 different vendors and they all have totally different Mac addresses.
Internally they're all Bluetooth to serial chips, and another pic16xxxx chip which does serial to canbus.
I guess the Bluetooth serial chips probably have programmable Mac addresses, but equally they normally ship with a globally default one unless you flash a different one onto it.
And it's worth considering that obfuscation only ever worked against casuals for whom tedious was a bridge too far. Nation state actors and criminal hacker groups, on the other hand, consider the tedious entirely worth it.
The cool thing about cryptographic security is that it's an asymmetric amount of cost for both parties - to encode is cheap, to break is many orders of magnitude harder, unlike obfuscation where the difficulty is approximately symmetrical.
All security is always a matter of cost. Clown theater starts once you lose track of it, and start doing security for security's sake.
RE obfuscation and nation states - nation states have finite budgets too, both in terms of resources and attention. They can crack any system at any time, but they can't afford to crack all of the systems all of the time.
Entirely without LLMs, I'm imagining an office of North Korean compsci graduates doing astonishingly tedious tasks, for whom an office job on a basic Linux computer and slightly better diet and nice apartment put them in the top 1-2% of living standard in the country.
I'm 100% confident in hardware companies' ability to make infinitely incompetent software given infinitely smart agents. They do it because they don't care about software, not because they lack tools. No agent can turn them into software companies if they don't want it themselves.
Back in the mid-1990s, I was working at an ISP and also at a consulting firm. The consulting firm's #1 business at the time was to get businesses connected to the Internet, where these businesses already had significant LAN buildouts.
Now these were the days before IANA had officially assigned those "Private IP Network" numbers. Nobody had any private IPv4 space to work with! So the choices consisted of: make up some numbers and hope they don't conflict, or go ahead and register your IPv4 space and get public netblocks assigned, even if you're just using them privately.
So, needless to say, we encountered some bonkers configurations, and a lot of our job was undoing some really awful configurations in order to make them compliant with actual Internet connectivity, and so that different office LANs would interoperate properly.
We were also big advocates of security, firewalls, and the venerable "DMZ/Bastion" setups from back in the day, so those Private IP Network assignments would've been really useful, along with NAT, but we simply didn't have those tools at our disposal, and our clients were basically registering huge IPv4 blocks that they really didn't need to ever use.
The CSS selector they used (`a[href*="://"]::after`) is meant to only target only external links, but assumes any internal links will be using relative paths like `href="/about"`. The problem is that this site uses absolute URLs (`href="https://hhh.hn/about"`) for its nav links, so every link ends up with an icon.
You could fix this by adding an exception to the CSS rule so it skips links starting with your site's name:
It’s kind of interesting - I imported security cameras for a business roughly twenty hours ago. The security problems at the time were unbelievable to a point that any kind of wireless, IP or any type of service offering remote view was really scary. It was always stupid stuff - little oversights, things that were hard coded and shouldn’t have been or extremely old versions of insecure software running critical functions.
what a good blog to read. Have you found answer on why they use the same token across these bunch of files? Maybe they are tying to adopt the agentic code writing?
One interesting questions, what does that gh token give access to? It is only read from private repo, is not it? You said "admin" privileges earlier.
the same token copy-pasted into 30 files. not even a config file. they baked their github admin credentials into the firmware image like it was a version number.
> Why would Hanwha Vision need anything remotely related to the DoD? Is it possible that their CI is provided by some centralized team at their parent company Hanwha, where the needs of their sister company Hanwha Aerospace cause the shared platform to have these entries in the CI environment variables? Or maybe because of their other sister company, Hanwha Defense USA, where they make other large scary steel machines
Or... the Department of Warmongers (nee DoD) addresses on the device are evidence of a supply-side attack targeting the DoW and carried out using the aforementioned github admin token.
... I mean, while we're in here speculating about truffles and all.
My cameras are analog rather than PoE or IP based, but that's just because I set up the initial iteration of the system a long time ago. The standard now is to give your camera an IP address.
With many IoT type things I block access to the public internet. I think with cameras specifically a lot of people even set it up physically on a different network that can only talk to the NVR.
But tldr, basing the cameras on IP invites some of the things in this article. Anyone deploying these devices needs to think about securing them.
Why would you write like that? Not capitalizing the first word of a sentence makes the whole thing less readable. So that you can feel special? Really?
Abusing IP ranges which were assigned to an organization but aren't actually used on the public Internet as private addresses is pretty common. Sure, it's bad practice, but not a big deal.
I know you're a mastermind when it comes to security, but you should provide more context about the tools and methods you're using in your article so we can better understand what it's all about and not have to Google every single step you're taking.
I feel like every security blog (or even just tech blog) I've read recently has had paragraphs and paragraphs of largely LLM generated explainer waffle. This felt refreshingly focused and to the point.
i’m not a mastermind, and I agree it could be more accessible. I treat this blog as somewhere to just dump my thoughts as unfiltered as I can while still being useful or entertaining, maybe for some other posts I will go more into depth
Seemed perfectly reasonable to me. Not everything has to be written for a target audience that includes you, besides you were able to look up what you needed it seems. Another tactic is to feed the article to your favorite LLM and interrogate it about what you don't understand.
I have looked around before but I only found genuinely dev-oriented kits that weren't even in a shell, and crazy priced.
edit: seems there are some options now (or I missed them before), e.g. https://www.goodcam.io/#for-independent-developers