[Cryptography] doorbells for Ukraine

[Henry Baker]

-----Original Message-----
From: William Allen Simpson <william.allen.simpson at gmail.com>
Sent: Dec 18, 2022 4:37 PM
To: cryptography moderated list <cryptography at metzdowd.com>
Subject: [Cryptography] doorbells for Ukraine

Surely somebody else has already thought of this, but....

Ring had/has a Ukraine R&D facility.

Ukraine needs to detect incoming shells, missiles, drones.

Wouldn't a few (thousand) cloud connected cameras and microphones be
able to determine paths and trajectories?

Also, is there any ongoing public effort to standardize secure
Nest and Ring interoperable communications?

------------------
Several years ago, I got an Amazon 'Blink' battery-operated camera,
and had several thoughts about how one might utilize these devices
for interesting applications.

https://www.amazon.com/blink-camera/s?k=blink+camera

Since this camera is *battery operated* and utilizes wifi for comms,
I envisioned using a large number of these cameras to photograph
a *marathon running race*.

One idea was to attach one camera every so many meters down a
26-mile-long rope, and have the cameras daisy chain wifi comms
along the rope. A truck could easily spool out this rope while driving
the course ahead of time, and later spool the rope back onto the
truck after the race was over.


Clearly, this idea would also work for securing a *boundary* -- perhaps
a fence or a road or a stream.

One could also simply drop a large number of these devices out of
an airplane or drone, together with a Starlink antenna, and so long
as the devices landed within reasonable proximity to one another,
a wifi path could be found to talk to the Starlink.

Of course, the batteries would eventually wear out, but the devices
are pretty cheap, so a tradeoff could be made between more
expensive batteries and the cost of simply replacing them all.

Of course, someone could trivially detect such devices by their
wifi signals, but the good news is that in order to save battery
life, the cameras typically sleep the vast % of the time, so their
wifi signature isn't evident until someone triggers the cameras
with some perceived threat.