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Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

arstechnica.com

131–140 of 191 posts

Re: Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

#132
post #125

"unauthorized users". They are authorized if they are trying to control their own garage door. The company I work for has a policy where we don't block third party clients, as long as they use a uniquely identifiable user agent and API key that we provide to them. That way we can easily monitor if they're calling endpoints excessively and make sure that our alarms don't go off when they did something wrong, but still…

I just connected my garage door opener to Home Assistant by taking apart the remote and wiring the button to a Zigbee relay. They can't stop me, no part of this is connected to their cloud. In any case, smart home stuff should never rely on the cloud. https://i.imgur.com/lNOXdhe.jpg

Funny you should mention that. I stayed at an AirBnB a while back that I selected precisely because the listing mentioned that a garage was available. It turned out that yes, you could use the garage, but the remote was not provided by the host. So I had to disengage the door and lift it manually, then close it behind me when I left every morning.

"Fuck that," I said to myself, as any self-respecting hacker would. "I'll just hook a $20 remote key fob switch from Home Depot up to the button on the garage wall."

That's when I found that they actually DRM'ed the button. The usual pair of wires was there, but I couldn't open the door by simply shorting them together. There were several ICs on a PC board inside the button housing doing Woz knows what. So, back to lifting the door manually.

This is only going to get worse. It will get worse because we let them go this far.

Re: Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

#133
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just connected my garage door opener to Home Assistant by taking apart the remote and wiring the button to a Zigbee relay. They can't stop me, no part of this is connected to their cloud. In any case, smart home stuff should never rely on the cloud. https://i.imgur.com/lNOXdhe.jpg

Funny you should mention that. I stayed at an AirBnB a while back that I selected precisely because the listing mentioned that a garage was available. It turned out that yes, you could use the garage, but the remote was not provided by the host. So I had to disengage the door and lift it manually, then close it behind me when I left every morning. "Fuck that," I said to myself, as any self-respecting hacker would. "I…

I don’t really think it’s DRM. I think it’s because a lot of garage door buttons have a few functionalities, like controlling the lights as well as the door, but it works over two wires. So it probably necessitates some more complicated logic.

Re: Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you should mention that. I stayed at an AirBnB a while back that I selected precisely because the listing mentioned that a garage was available. It turned out that yes, you could use the garage, but the remote was not provided by the host. So I had to disengage the door and lift it manually, then close it behind me when I left every morning. "Fuck that," I said to myself, as any self-respecting hacker would. "I…

I don’t really think it’s DRM. I think it’s because a lot of garage door buttons have a few functionalities, like controlling the lights as well as the door, but it works over two wires. So it probably necessitates some more complicated logic.

This one didn't. It was literally just a featureless button, engineered with intelligence it couldn't possibly need except as a means of locking out third-party hardware.

Re: Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

#135
post #3

The Ars comments recommend Ratgo and Messo. Ratgo for a WiFi board that connects directly to the garage doors electrical and Messo is another cheap HomeKit option from Amazon. https://paulwieland.github.io/ratgdo/

Have those comments talked about their compatibility with home assistant? I'm done with Chamberlin and their dumb app. I want a one-stop app to control all of my IoT devices, and I don't want it locked into an ecosystem.

I see ratgdo mentioned a lot in home-assistant-related places. I’m not sure about the other.

I don’t have mqtt setup on my home assistant (yet?), which the primary ratgdo firmware relies on, but there’s also an esphome-based firmware that should work for me.

edit: one of those mentions is https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/11/06/removal-of-myq...

Re: Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you should mention that. I stayed at an AirBnB a while back that I selected precisely because the listing mentioned that a garage was available. It turned out that yes, you could use the garage, but the remote was not provided by the host. So I had to disengage the door and lift it manually, then close it behind me when I left every morning. "Fuck that," I said to myself, as any self-respecting hacker would. "I…

I don’t really think it’s DRM. I think it’s because a lot of garage door buttons have a few functionalities, like controlling the lights as well as the door, but it works over two wires. So it probably necessitates some more complicated logic.

It's Security+ or Security+ 2.0, it is literally obfuscated serial traffic over two wires. It is DRM. You can't just get any random button to open/close the garage.

Re: Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

#137
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just connected my garage door opener to Home Assistant by taking apart the remote and wiring the button to a Zigbee relay. They can't stop me, no part of this is connected to their cloud. In any case, smart home stuff should never rely on the cloud. https://i.imgur.com/lNOXdhe.jpg

Funny you should mention that. I stayed at an AirBnB a while back that I selected precisely because the listing mentioned that a garage was available. It turned out that yes, you could use the garage, but the remote was not provided by the host. So I had to disengage the door and lift it manually, then close it behind me when I left every morning. "Fuck that," I said to myself, as any self-respecting hacker would. "I…

> This is only going to get worse.

Manual operation seems perfectly understandable in this context. Odds of some AirBnB driving off accidentally with the remote approach 100%.

Re: Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

#138
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just connected my garage door opener to Home Assistant by taking apart the remote and wiring the button to a Zigbee relay. They can't stop me, no part of this is connected to their cloud. In any case, smart home stuff should never rely on the cloud. https://i.imgur.com/lNOXdhe.jpg

Funny you should mention that. I stayed at an AirBnB a while back that I selected precisely because the listing mentioned that a garage was available. It turned out that yes, you could use the garage, but the remote was not provided by the host. So I had to disengage the door and lift it manually, then close it behind me when I left every morning. "Fuck that," I said to myself, as any self-respecting hacker would. "I…

> That's when I found that they actually DRM'ed the button. The usual pair of wires was there, but I couldn't open the door by simply shorting them together.

Oof. That's awful, but put a servo above the button that physically hits the button. Analog loopholes are immune to DRM.

Re: Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no real law to maximize profits. Just greed and a court precedent, which has way more nuance than people realize. No body of legislation ever said that companies needed to maximize profits.

> There’s no real law to maximize profits. Just greed and a court precedent, I thought that in Common Law countries, court precedents are "real law". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law > In law, common law (also known as judicial precedent, judge-made law, or case law) is the body of law created by judges and similar quasi-judicial tribunals by virtue of being stated in written opinions. (emphasis mine)

Y'all are arguing about a specific class of corporation while using the word "company". A company could be one guy with an LLC, and that one guy is obligated by no law or person to earn a profit as long as he can sustain the costs of the business. A great example of a company that appears to be operating at a loss for a very long time because of the beliefs of the founder/owner is Canonical.

If he cannot sustain the costs of the business then I guess you can argue that there's a law of nature in play saying that the proprietor has to earn some amount of profit just to exist, but if you're shaking your fist at Nature demanding that we produce the value that we intend to consume, well, good luck. You may as well be upset about the existence of gravity, or that food must be grown or hunted in order to be eaten.

Re: Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep. the RatGDO project will handily MITM their wired signal and completely circumvent this nonsense with no cloud needed at all. https://github.com/PaulWieland/ratgdo

Opengarage is a similar option that comes out of the box ready to go. Also FOSS. https://opengarage.io/

Thanks for this, glanced at the site and I like that it's got a motion sensor built into the unit which is convenient. But I wasn't able to tell from an admittedly cursory glance if the opengarage can decrypt the Security+ 2.0 signal that's on the wire in MyQ devices, or if it's just a dry contact switch replacement which will not work for such devices.
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