Show HN: Open-source private home security camera system (end-to-end encryption)

Hey everyone,

I previously introduced an open source private home security camera in 2024, which uses OpenMLS for end-to-end encryption: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42284412.

It was called Privastead then and it's now renamed to Secluso.

John Kaczman found my project from here and has been working on it with me over the last year and half. We've made a lot of improvements to the software, which we would like to share with you:

- You can now set this up on your Raspberry Pi in less than 5 minutes with no technical expertise using our easy-to-use GUI deploy tool. We've put together a comprehensive build-your-own guide that walks you through the required steps (you can find a link at the top of the repository README).

- We use a customized, minimal OS based on the Yocto project for the camera.

- Every part of our stack except for the iOS app has reproducible builds. This includes our Android app, camera/server binaries, deploy tool, and the aforementioned OS.

- We've re-designed our mobile app, which is now on the iOS App Store and Google Play store.

- We now support UnifiedPush for more privacy-preserving push notifications.

Looking forward to seeing what you all think!

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eichin 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Ah, the name is a near-miss vs https://secuso.aifb.kit.edu/english/105.php (the SECurity USability SOciety research group at Karlsruhe) that makes the "Privacy Friendly Apps" suite for Android. (I don't think there's any actual confusion, it was just a "why did that sound familiar" reflex :-)

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blitzo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm curious about the Yocto based OS. Can you tell us about the architecture? How small the LOC is and how much customization has been done if it based from existing stacks?

	▲	jkaczman 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Hi u/blitzo, thanks for the reply! I'm the other contributor mentioned in the post (John Kaczman). In case you're not familiar with the Yocto Project, it's designed to be a tool/template for developers (like Ardalan and I!) to use to create custom Linux images for embedded devices (in this case, a Raspberry Pi). It works off of distributing layers/recipes (these "templates") in open-source repositories for re-use among such developers that can be very easily baked in and customized if necessary. Our current usage of it is relatively small. Our OS codebase is roughly ~1,000 LOC of a few recipe modifications (e.g. for fixing reproducible build issues, some minimizations, necessary dependencies we need), and, of course, integrating our camera_hub binary and updater binary (as well as their respective system services). We also bake in a custom rpicam-apps (the library responsible for driving camera feeds into the app), which was modified to be more performant in our use case (specifically, we modified it to add a secondary UNIX domain socket channel to send raw images simultaneously with the H.264 stream, so that we wouldn't need to decode them separately). Additionally, there's ONNX Runtime, which I mention below. In the image itself, we've added two partitions: a data and provisioning partition. The data partition is designed to separate the mutable data (the state files for our camera binary) against the rest of the root filesystem. The provision partition is used by the deploy tool to inject a random camera_secret in as the pre-shared key (PSK) used to initiate pairing in OpenMLS (for our E2EE). We have a lot of future work in store for this Secluso OS! A few things I'm working on right now are a read-only root filesystem (through squashfs), hardening the kernel, and getting rid of a massive dependency we currently rely on (ONNX Runtime) for machine learning. We've been working with burn, a popular Rust machine learning library, to optimize their "burn-flex" crate to match the performance of ONNX Runtime for the model we use for object detection. After that's done, half of the dependencies used by the OS will be able to be removed! (as ONNX Runtime drags in things such as python). Please let me know if you have any questions!

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wmf 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What's the difference between the hub and the server?

	▲	arrdalan 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The camera_hub runs in the camera. It records videos, encrypts them, and sends them to the mobile app. The server is a relay in the cloud. It transfers encrypted videos from the camera to the mobile app.