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Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

home-assistant.io

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Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#401

Post by Eduard »

pjsg wrote: post #345
twicetwice wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good suggestion, but where and how does HA receive callbacks? I would guess that almost all HA instances are behind residential LANs and most aren't accessible on the public internet. You could use dynamic DNS and forward ports, but that's flaky, you might run into CGNAT, etc. And anyway, it's best if your HA instance isn't publicly addressable; mine is only accessible over my personal WireGuard VPN and I intend to k…

MQTT is the solution for this. Note that the garage door openers talk MQTT to the myq service (over TLS with preshared keys). It should be possible to subscribe to events from your garage door opener(s) and also to send commands to it.

but MQTT alone doesn't solve the challenge for some Internet server to push messages to a Home Assistance instance running inside a home network / behind a router / behind a firewall / NAT unless a port is opened on the router, or long-polling is used.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#402

Post by deadbunny »

kkielhofner wrote: post #283
TeMPOraL wrote: post #7

From company statement: > Our customers rely on us to make access simple without sacrificing quality and reliability. Unauthorized app integrations, stemming from only 0.2% of myQ users, previously accounted for more than half of the traffic to and from the myQ system, and at times constituted a substantial DDOS event that consumed high quantities of resources. Yeah, that sounds plausible, because: - Home Assistant u…

At the end of the day this is a very reasonable business decision - an incredibly obvious and easy one. Chamberlain/myQ makes very low cost (likely loss-leader) mass manufactured devices. Like anything else if you can identify 0.2% of your users leading to 50% of an issue you're having the reasonable thing to do (from a business perspective) is to just cut them loose. If this CTO or anyone at Chamberlain were to try…

> There are 275k active Home Assistant installations[0]

Nit: That they know of. As you say it's a techy product and I would assume that techy types are the exact kind of people to turn off analytics.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#403

Post by LeifCarrotson »

judge2020 wrote: post #382
SoftTalker wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people already have a keypad mounted outside that will open the garage door. You can set up a guest code there and give to Amazon, or anyone you want. There is zero need for internet-enabled smartness in the garage door opener here.

Okay, but the adoption rate of "let me create a code for my packages and give it to the Amazon person" is perhaps two or three orders of magnitude lower than if Amazon shows a bunch of call-to-actions for "link your myQ account for secure deliveries".

And if Chaimberlain charges Amazon $0.50 per door opened to enable that feature (which steers buyers towards Amazon and away from the manufacturer website, Walmart/target/eBay/random competitor that doesn't have that feature) that might be a bigger, recurring, higher-margin revenue stream than all of Chaimberlain's traditional manufacturing profits. Which would you rather have - $200 revenue for a $100 cost once in 20 years, or $0.50 per week for a few packets of data?

They could afford to give away the openers if they could win that revenue stream.

And Amazon would dump them in a second if consumers could instead click "Link your Home Assistant for secure deliveries and get $0.30 digital credit". Or more likely, Amazon would throw directly wired Dash buttons at consumers to enable secure deliveries.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#404

Post by LeifCarrotson »

kelnos wrote: post #292
bluGill wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For retailers I want someone to verify that they are legitimate. I don't want random people in my garage. If someone enters my garage when I'm not home they better really be agents for WalMart/Amazon/target/UPS (as opposed to WolMort/Amozan/targit/USP...) , and whatever company does that does background checks on drivers. Probably they also need to have other cameras in their vehicles so that drivers trying to steal…

> as already pointed out, most people have an unlocked door from the garage to the house Not sure where you live, but every house I've lived in (USA, a few different states) during my entire life has had an exterior-quality door with exterior-quality lock, including deadbolt, between the house and garage. In the one house I lived in that had a security system, that garage-to-interior door was also wired into the syst…

My in-laws have this, but mine, my parents, my siblings, my wife's siblings, and my neighbor all have a big window in that door. And none of them are ever locked.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#405

Post by AJayWalker »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #390
chewmieser wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MyQ app should work fine. Just not the API integration to MyQ.

Couldn't people do some reverse-engineering to figure out the first-party protocol and impersonate the official app in the API integration?

AFAIK yes, but to quote the article (which quotes the maintainer of the MyQ integration, Lash-L [0]), “We are playing a game of cat and mouse with MyQ and right now it looks like the cat is winning”

[0] https://github.com/Lash-L

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#406

Post by joe_blow_devops »

I have a MyQ on my door. Just use the basic app that came with it and like the notifications / door status.

Reading this is the first I've learned about ads in the app (sure enough, I looked and they are there now). This annoys me greatly as if the device bought and paid for isn't enough, so now they get to serve up ads...

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#407

Post by Eduard »

bonzini wrote: post #78
PurpleRamen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but according to their statement, the official client seems to behave better than the HA-implementation. Maybe HA is brute forcing something, like pulling state every 10 seconds or so. And this is a legit complaint from their side if this is the case.

If pulling the state goes through the cloud app it is their (self-inflicted) problem.

any home IoT solution without a cloud inbetween and which shall also be able to communicate with you while on the go requires a lot of technical expertise (and perpetual maintenance...). It is therefore not viable for the mass market.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#408

Post by tuckerman »

andrewaylett wrote: post #365
tuckerman wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you pay for the home assistant cloud subscription (built into HA, ~5 USD/mo) they can provision custom callback URLs for you so you don’t have to expose your HA instance. I have this setup for certain integrations such as Samsung Smart Things. It’s not a perfect solution since it costs money but it’s a nice alternative to exposing your HA instance or some other front end proxy to the internet.

Unfortunately it's not actually that different in effect -- Nabu Casa proxy the encrypted TCP connection, rather than terminating TLS and proxying HTTP, which is great for privacy but not so much for providing an extra layer of security on top of HA itself. It is also much easier for those without easy access to extra static IP addresses. Given the target audience I think it's probably the right approach.

I don't think it's entirely devoid of security improvements---you need to know the webhook address in order to get access to talk to a HA instance which would be a lot more difficult than just port scanning for an open (perhaps unpatched) HA instance on the open internet. I would still prefer it though if things would expose a local API or speak MQTT however.

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#409

Post by deadbunny »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #229
gog wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On each integration page there is a button that states if the integration is local or remote.

Oh, that. I'm actually wondering if they are making this hard on purpose . The obvious way to implement this would be to have a front-and-center filter for cloud/local, so that one could use it to check which brands to consider before buying new connected hardware. It's a use case people have been asking for years. It's the only reason one would want to access a searchable list through their own page (as opposed to g…

> What's the blocker here?

It's an open source project. Stuff generally gets worked on by people who care about features. You seem to care about this. https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant.io

Re: Home Assistant blocked from integrating with Garage Door opener API

#410

Post by andykellr »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #386
cptcobalt wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's a distraction and orthogonal to your point, but your statement of a "key fob for your Tesla for $300" is fallacious and incorrect. Tesla uses Phone Key with with the Tesla app as your primary method of unlocking the car, with a $20 NFC card as fallback, and the limit of paired phones is above any practical real-world use. If you want a keyfob as a status symbol, it's $175. (Mine is a desk ornament, it doe…

Since you noted it, it’s actually very much part of my point. Tesla engages in price segmentation for replacement key fobs because they have key control. Perhaps even more aggressively than most other automakers short of VW Group. When done well it’s invisible to the user. I suspect by your (polite) comment that you may not be aware that’s going on here. Premium users pay $300 to replace the fob on their Model S / Mo…

> And an entry level option exists for the cards. Plus programming fee. Handling fee. Local taxes. Processing fee. Etc :-)

Cards are $20. No programming fee, no handling fee, no processing fee. Yes, there are taxes and yes shipping things generally costs money. Users program keys themselves.

> As an aside, I find the fob useful for booting the car up prior to getting in, rather than waiting 40 seconds before the fly-by-wire shifter starts responding to commands to put it in gear.

Keys are for valet and I keep mine in my glove box. The car boots up almost instantly.

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