The alarm mlist
It's really nice to integrate an alarm and physical security, so that you turn off alarms when unlocking, or vice-versa. Anything that works without human intervention is likely more reliable than something which relies on you remembering to do something.
I consider this a "physical IDS".
Also, if you're leaving (locking doors, turning on alarm), perhaps turning off lights makes sense too, to save energy.
zoneminder and a tutorial on using zoneminder for video surveillance
analog cameras suck - require digitizer to do anything with them, ties up digitizer!
CMOS can suck - may be too noisy to do motion detection - prefer CCD
going froma analog to digital (digitizing board) can introduce noise which can mess up motion detection
left object detection (used in airports to detect bombs)
desirable that they be hidden, or out of easy reach, so people don't break them down as soon as they enter
would be nice to be able to reposition them occasionally for surprise effect
in low light conditions, black and white is better than color - some high-end cameras can switch automatically
the IR cameras use IR LED illuminators, and cheap ones have very short range - and no color at night of course
video is high bandwidth, bear that in mind when processing/recording
you will want timecodes for evidentiary reasons
you might want to design it so that it is only looked at if something bad happens to preserve privacy
placement is critical - you want to place them strategically to maximize chance of burglar being seen
for hallway cameras, might not need pan/tilt, but for remote investigation, you can zoom in on faces, and possibly avoid a FP and trip to premises
TODO: look into Axis cameras
better than IR is to turn on lights after 2 seconds of capture
Someone on the net says:
A bit pricey around $1000, the mobotix M24 SEC or M24 SEC-night has a 360 hemisphere below the unit (mounts for outdoor and housing available). 3 Megapixels ie MXGA 2048x1535 max density.
Also can do license plate capture on stationary and slowly moving vehicles with easy - if you bolt down speed bumps and some curbs to channel the vehicles right in view of the camera.
Can be expanded into alarm systems with mobotix moboIO, runs via the web on standard protocols i.e. SMB/NFS, HTTP/HTTPS, can act as as DHCP server, and the cam's motions detectors and logical alerts can combine between 2 or more cams.
Can be wedged into zoneminder for recording or record to NFS or SMB or local USB disk OR thumbdrive or...
Chats to my iphone with extreme ease (I am using it at a client for robbery and shoplifting protection so that I have digitally signed court ready HD images (the cam allows an ssl cert to be installed for signing the MJPEGS making up the video stream. I havent seen ANY other manufacturer at the pricing level do this (not even in more expensive cams).
It also is powered via POE requires neither video balun NOR cabling power supplies etc not does it require an NVR to run, it has both microphone (also alarms on sound threshold if set) and speaker accessible to from SIP and chats to both... ("STOP THIEF")...
Internal embedded OS IS linux (big surprise).
One possibly novel idea I had was to integrate WiFi and Bluetooth MAC address sniffing into the alarm system. Perhaps this could be extended into phones. One could also use something like karma to create a WAP or Bluetooth station that probes for as much information as possible. This invisible monitoring could also be used to verify the identity of a thief later. Of course one would probably need to monitor generally in order to eliminate nearby residents, though it is likely that thieves visited the place ealier. In fact, that might be useful to correlate with camera systems; they might hide their identity on the theft night but not on the reconnaisance.
automatic off when in range is dangerous (proxy/relay attack)
by cell phone (asterisk AGI)
over Internet (in case you're at work and forgot to enable)
Some sysadmins I know use IRC servers to get alerts out, because in an emergency, it tends to route data pretty well - it has evolved while facing numerous DDoS attacks on public servers.
hacked X10 alarm system? - nice in that it runs off 9V for a long time - stupid hard-coded alarm response - X10 FAQ see Q510 - Picture of guts of X10 security system
The antenna mount is in the top left of the photo, the copper bracket. Just below it and to the right is the power transformer.
The chip with the white label on it says (Motorola) PIC 16C54-XT/P // 9952CAB
The chip under the ribbon cable has a silkscreen that's hard to photograph also, but it reads XS0006AB // COP840C MEI-N, with a weird logo that kind of looks like a mirror image of a capital S.
microcontroller to monitor sensors, do handshakes, only alert CPU if needed - Arduino seems well-liked - don't want main CPU to be tied up polling, especially - CPU time too valuable - STM32 series & LPC17xx series have limited DSP capabilities for a Cortex M3. They have a sleep mode, and run RTOS or linux variant easily.
Linux MCE is some sort of media center and home automation distro, and has a security package
Also there's the possibility of using a Raspberry Pi!
interactive web page for investigation of incident
some banks require multiple kinds of sensors to alert to reduce FP rate
