6 ms·

> Absolute nightmare. Yes, but still probably a million times easier for both the building management and the software vendor to have a SaaS for that, than hav

by sofixa 9mo ago

> Absolute nightmare. Yes, but still probably a million times easier for both the building management and the software vendor to have a SaaS for that, than having to buy hardware to put somewhere in the building (with redundant power, cooling, etc.), and have someone deploy, install, manage, update, etc. all of that.

Nextgrid 9mo ago
> with redundant power, cooling, etc The doors the system controls don't have any of this. Hell, the whole building doesn't have any of this. And it definitely doesn't have redundant internet connections to the cloud-based control plane. This is fear-mongering when a passive PC running a container image on boot will suffice plenty. For updates a script that runs on boot and at regular intervals that pulls down the latest image with a 30s timeout if it can't reach the server.
- lazide 9mo ago
  Those devices can be trivially power cycled, and won’t have as many issues with dodgy power. Some PC somewhere with storage is a bigger problem.
  - Nextgrid 9mo ago
    > Some PC somewhere with storage is a bigger problem Both an embedded microcontroller and a PC have storage. The reason you can power-cycle a microcontroller at will is because that storage is read-only and only a specific portion dedicated to state is writable (and the device can be reset if that ever gets corrupted). Use a buildroot/yocto image on the PC with read-only partitions and a separate state partition that the system can rebuild on boot if it gets corrupted and you'll have something that can be power-cycled with no issues. Network hardware is internally often Linux-based and manages to do fine for exactly this reason.
    - lazide 9mo ago
      PCs are orders of magnitude more complex, with a lot more to break. Sounds like a whole lot of work for… what? Assuming the internet connection and AWS work of course. Which they won’t always, then oops.
      - Nextgrid 9mo ago
        If you're relying on AWS you either way have a "PC" to relay communication between AWS and the keycard readers & door latches.
        lazide 9mo ago
        There are IoT libraries that don’t require that.
      - bluGill 9mo ago
        A large number of embedded micro controllers are just PCs running Yocto linux configured as GP said. You can save money with a $.05 micro controller, but in most cases the development costs to make that entire system work are more than just buying an off the shelf raspberry pi.
- onli 9mo ago
  What updates? That would be on a local network and have no internet connection, if done right.
  - sofixa 9mo ago
    And? That doesn't mean, especially for a system with security impact (like door access), that it should never be updated.
  - csomar 9mo ago
    I am guessing the main attraction of such a system is that owners can set the cards remotely and get data about it (ie: who accessed and when)
- Telemakhos 9mo ago
  You know what else would suffice plenty? Physical keys and mechanical locks. They worked (and still work) without electricity. The tech is mature and well-understood.
  - Nextgrid 9mo ago
    The reason for moving away from physical keys is that key management becomes a nightmare; you can't "revoke" a key without changing all the locks which is an expensive operation and requires distributing new keys to everyone else. Electronic access control solves that.
  - hoistbypetard 9mo ago
    You might find Matt Blaze's paper on vulnerabilities in master-keyed physical locks interesting: https://eprint.iacr.org/2002/160.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2002/160.pdf
potato3732842 9mo ago
>than having to buy hardware to put somewhere in the building (with redundant power, cooling, etc.), and have someone deploy, install, manage, update, etc. all of that. You don't need any of that. You need one more box in the electrical closet and one password protected wifi for all the crap in the building (the actual door locks and the like) to connect to.
- sofixa 9mo ago
  And when that box fails, you're looking at how long with no access? Longer than any AWS outage.
  - trinix912 9mo ago
    The IT guy walks in and replaces/restarts the box instead of waiting for the gods of AWS to descent to earth and restart theirs. They have direct control vs. waiting for something magic to happen.
    - sofixa 9mo ago
      The building has an onsite IT guy with enough spares to fix anything that could go wrong with the box?
      - trinix912 9mo ago
        Have you ever actually seen these systems in person? It's usually a microcontroller which already rules out a ton of stuff you're talking about. Serious places will buy 2-3 of them at the time of installation to have some spares. The ones here are "user-replaceable" as well (unplug these three cables, replace the box, plug them back in). It's not some mysterious bunch-of-wires-on-arduino-pins magic box that nobody dares to touch. The one at my previous office even had centralized management through an RS232 connection to a PC. No internet and related downtime at all. And I don't recall us ever being locked out because of that.
    - gopher_space 9mo ago
csomar 9mo ago
The system was not built with resiliency in mind and had no care/considerations for what a shit-show will unfurl once the system or the link goes down. I wonder if exit is regulated (you can still fully exit the building from any point using the green buttons and I think these are supposed to activate/still work even if electricity is down). > Yes, but still probably a million times easier for both the building management and the software vendor to have a SaaS for that, than having to buy hardware to put somewhere in the building (with redundant power, cooling, etc.) A isolated building somewhere in the middle of the jungle dependent for its operation on some American data-center hundreds of miles away is simply negligence. I am usually against regulations but clearly for certain things we can trust that all humans will be reasonable.
- HWR_14 9mo ago
  In the US, the answer is that exit would have to work in the event that AWS is down or power is out. Some exceptions exist for special cases.
Ekaros 9mo ago
Easier maybe. But significantly worse. Parts of these systems have been build and engineered to be entirely reliable with automatic hand-overs when some component fails or with alternative routings when some connection is lost.
jon-wood 9mo ago
Its absolutely possible to have both a SaaS based control plane and continue functioning if the internet connection/control plane becomes unavailable for a period. There's presumably hardware on site anyway to forward requests to the servers which are doing access control, it wouldn't be difficult to have that hardware keep a local cache of the current configuration. Done that way you might find you can't make changes to who's authorised while the connection is unavailable, but you can still let people who were already authorised into their rooms.
- yencabulator 9mo ago
  Yes, but your average webdev doesn't know how to program that SaaS, so the market is saturated with bad software.
quickthrowman 9mo ago
Cooling for a card access system? A card access system requires zero cooling, it’s a DC power supply or AC transformer and a microcontroller that fits in a small unvented metal enclosure. It requires no management other than activating and deactivating badges. There is no reason to have any of the lock and unlock functionality tied to the cloud, it’s just shitty engineering by a company who wants to extract rent from their customers.
- sofixa 9mo ago
  The server running that system needs cooling, yes. You can't just shove it in a closet with zero thought and expect it to not overheat/shut down/catch fire, unless you live in the Arctic.
  - dgacmu 9mo ago
    I have a little fanless mini PC that runs various stuff around my house, including homeassistant. The case is basically a big heat sink. It started crashing during backups. The solution was to stick a fan on it. :( This is literally a box _designed to not need a fan_. And yet. It now has a fan and has been stable for months. And it's not even in a closet - it's wall-mounted with lots of available air around it.
    - TeMPOraL 9mo ago
      I'm guessing it's the HDD that's failing. Had such mysterious failures with my NVR (the Cloud Key thingie) from UniFi. Turns out, HDDs don't like operating in 60+ degree Celsius heat all the time - but SSDs don't mind, so fortunately the fix was just to swap the drive for a solid state one.
      - dgacmu 9mo ago
        I think it was the DRAM on mine, oddly. It already uses an nvme ssd. Could have been the CPU, of course - the error was manifesting as memory corruption but that could well have been happening during read or write.
unethical_ban 9mo ago
It's also easier to keep all the water for fighting fires in trucks that are remote, than to run high pressure water pipes to every room's ceilings, with special valves that only open when exposed to high heat. Imagine the overhead costs!

by sofixa 9mo ago

Nextgrid 9mo ago

> with redundant power, cooling, etc The doors the system controls don't have any of this. Hell, the whole building doesn't have any of this. And it definitely doesn't have redundant internet connections to the cloud-based control plane. This is fear-mongering when a passive PC running a container image on boot will suffice plenty. For updates a script that runs on boot and at regular intervals that pulls down the latest image with a 30s timeout if it can't reach the server.

lazide 9mo ago
Those devices can be trivially power cycled, and won’t have as many issues with dodgy power. Some PC somewhere with storage is a bigger problem.
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  > Some PC somewhere with storage is a bigger problem Both an embedded microcontroller and a PC have storage. The reason you can power-cycle a microcontroller at will is because that storage is read-only and only a specific portion dedicated to state is writable (and the device can be reset if that ever gets corrupted). Use a buildroot/yocto image on the PC with read-only partitions and a separate state partition that the system can rebuild on boot if it gets corrupted and you'll have something that can be power-cycled with no issues. Network hardware is internally often Linux-based and manages to do fine for exactly this reason.
  - lazide 9mo ago
    PCs are orders of magnitude more complex, with a lot more to break. Sounds like a whole lot of work for… what? Assuming the internet connection and AWS work of course. Which they won’t always, then oops.
    - Nextgrid 9mo ago
      If you're relying on AWS you either way have a "PC" to relay communication between AWS and the keycard readers & door latches.
      - lazide 9mo ago
        There are IoT libraries that don’t require that.
    - bluGill 9mo ago
      A large number of embedded micro controllers are just PCs running Yocto linux configured as GP said. You can save money with a $.05 micro controller, but in most cases the development costs to make that entire system work are more than just buying an off the shelf raspberry pi.
onli 9mo ago
What updates? That would be on a local network and have no internet connection, if done right.
- sofixa 9mo ago
  And? That doesn't mean, especially for a system with security impact (like door access), that it should never be updated.
- csomar 9mo ago
  I am guessing the main attraction of such a system is that owners can set the cards remotely and get data about it (ie: who accessed and when)
Telemakhos 9mo ago
You know what else would suffice plenty? Physical keys and mechanical locks. They worked (and still work) without electricity. The tech is mature and well-understood.
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  The reason for moving away from physical keys is that key management becomes a nightmare; you can't "revoke" a key without changing all the locks which is an expensive operation and requires distributing new keys to everyone else. Electronic access control solves that.
- hoistbypetard 9mo ago
  You might find Matt Blaze's paper on vulnerabilities in master-keyed physical locks interesting: https://eprint.iacr.org/2002/160.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2002/160.pdf

potato3732842 9mo ago

>than having to buy hardware to put somewhere in the building (with redundant power, cooling, etc.), and have someone deploy, install, manage, update, etc. all of that. You don't need any of that. You need one more box in the electrical closet and one password protected wifi for all the crap in the building (the actual door locks and the like) to connect to.

sofixa 9mo ago
And when that box fails, you're looking at how long with no access? Longer than any AWS outage.
- trinix912 9mo ago
  The IT guy walks in and replaces/restarts the box instead of waiting for the gods of AWS to descent to earth and restart theirs. They have direct control vs. waiting for something magic to happen.
  - sofixa 9mo ago
    The building has an onsite IT guy with enough spares to fix anything that could go wrong with the box?
    - trinix912 9mo ago
      Have you ever actually seen these systems in person? It's usually a microcontroller which already rules out a ton of stuff you're talking about. Serious places will buy 2-3 of them at the time of installation to have some spares. The ones here are "user-replaceable" as well (unplug these three cables, replace the box, plug them back in). It's not some mysterious bunch-of-wires-on-arduino-pins magic box that nobody dares to touch. The one at my previous office even had centralized management through an RS232 connection to a PC. No internet and related downtime at all. And I don't recall us ever being locked out because of that.
  - gopher_space 9mo ago

csomar 9mo ago

The system was not built with resiliency in mind and had no care/considerations for what a shit-show will unfurl once the system or the link goes down. I wonder if exit is regulated (you can still fully exit the building from any point using the green buttons and I think these are supposed to activate/still work even if electricity is down). > Yes, but still probably a million times easier for both the building management and the software vendor to have a SaaS for that, than having to buy hardware to put somewhere in the building (with redundant power, cooling, etc.) A isolated building somewhere in the middle of the jungle dependent for its operation on some American data-center hundreds of miles away is simply negligence. I am usually against regulations but clearly for certain things we can trust that all humans will be reasonable.

HWR_14 9mo ago
In the US, the answer is that exit would have to work in the event that AWS is down or power is out. Some exceptions exist for special cases.

Ekaros 9mo ago

Easier maybe. But significantly worse. Parts of these systems have been build and engineered to be entirely reliable with automatic hand-overs when some component fails or with alternative routings when some connection is lost.

jon-wood 9mo ago

Its absolutely possible to have both a SaaS based control plane and continue functioning if the internet connection/control plane becomes unavailable for a period. There's presumably hardware on site anyway to forward requests to the servers which are doing access control, it wouldn't be difficult to have that hardware keep a local cache of the current configuration. Done that way you might find you can't make changes to who's authorised while the connection is unavailable, but you can still let people who were already authorised into their rooms.

yencabulator 9mo ago
Yes, but your average webdev doesn't know how to program that SaaS, so the market is saturated with bad software.

quickthrowman 9mo ago

Cooling for a card access system? A card access system requires zero cooling, it’s a DC power supply or AC transformer and a microcontroller that fits in a small unvented metal enclosure. It requires no management other than activating and deactivating badges. There is no reason to have any of the lock and unlock functionality tied to the cloud, it’s just shitty engineering by a company who wants to extract rent from their customers.

sofixa 9mo ago
The server running that system needs cooling, yes. You can't just shove it in a closet with zero thought and expect it to not overheat/shut down/catch fire, unless you live in the Arctic.
- dgacmu 9mo ago
  I have a little fanless mini PC that runs various stuff around my house, including homeassistant. The case is basically a big heat sink. It started crashing during backups. The solution was to stick a fan on it. :( This is literally a box _designed to not need a fan_. And yet. It now has a fan and has been stable for months. And it's not even in a closet - it's wall-mounted with lots of available air around it.
  - TeMPOraL 9mo ago
    I'm guessing it's the HDD that's failing. Had such mysterious failures with my NVR (the Cloud Key thingie) from UniFi. Turns out, HDDs don't like operating in 60+ degree Celsius heat all the time - but SSDs don't mind, so fortunately the fix was just to swap the drive for a solid state one.
    - dgacmu 9mo ago
      I think it was the DRAM on mine, oddly. It already uses an nvme ssd. Could have been the CPU, of course - the error was manifesting as memory corruption but that could well have been happening during read or write.

unethical_ban 9mo ago

It's also easier to keep all the water for fighting fires in trucks that are remote, than to run high pressure water pipes to every room's ceilings, with special valves that only open when exposed to high heat. Imagine the overhead costs!