Proprietary protocol may not be as "secure" as SimplySafe thought

If you thought that proprietary protocols are “safer” than Z-Wave or Zigbee, think again…

That’s old style jamming. Any RF system is potentially vulnerable to that, so most security systems have a callback protocol: if a monitoring device hasn’t checked in every minute or so they assume it’s been tampered with or jammed and set off a separate alert. (Commercial systems have even more complex set up‘s for a similar purpose.)

I’d be surprised if simplisafe doesn’t have something similar, it’s pretty standard these days, but maybe they don’t.

2015 article discussing jamming, and specifically Simplisafe:

Short answer: Most systems in this price range aren’t designed for targeted technologically sophisticated defense, but they have some defense in place, and then a burglar is just hoping that the system isn’t going to catch them this time.

The guy in the new video mentioned that sometimes the system did catch him and sometimes it didn’t when he used the jammer.

It’s also a good argument for multiple monitors on the same space: if there’s a window sensor, a glass break acoustic sensor, a motion sensor, and a camera all covering the same zone, it’s really unlikely that any inexpensive jamming equipment would take out all of them without also triggering the interference alert. :sunglasses:

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