Haven - Turn your Android phone into a home / hotel room / office security system

[Arthur]

This app was developed through a collaboration by Edward Snowden's Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Guardian Project.

 

Website / Download from: Google Play, GitHub, F-Droid / Source Code

 

Your digital security, any sufficiently paranoid person will remind you, is only as good as your physical security. The world's most sensitive users of technology, like dissidents, activists, or journalists in repressive regimes, have to fear not just hacking and online surveillance, but the reality that police, intelligence agents, or other intruders can simply break into your home, office, or hotel room. They can tamper with your computers, steal them, or bodily detain you until you cough up passwords or other secrets.

 

To help combat that threat, one of the world's most well-known activists against digital surveillance has released what's intended to be a cheap, mobile, and flexible version of a physical security system. On Friday, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and its president, famed NSA leaker Edward Snowden, launched Haven, an app designed to transform any Android phone into a kind of all-purpose sensor for detecting intrusions.

 

Safe Haven

Designed to be installed on a cheap Android burner, Haven uses the phone's cameras, microphones and even accelerometers to monitor for any motion, sound or disturbance of the phone. Leave the app running in your hotel room, for instance, and it can capture photos and audio of anyone entering the room while you're out, whether an innocent housekeeper or an intelligence agent trying to use his alone time with your laptop to install spyware on it. It can then instantly send pictures and sound clips of those visitors to your primary phone, alerting you to the disturbance. The app even uses the phone's light sensor to trigger an alert if the room goes dark, or an unexpected flashlight flickers.

 

More: www.wired.com/story/snowden-haven-app-turns-phone-into-home-security-system/

 

Haven is for people who need a way to protect their personal spaces and possessions without compromising their own privacy. It is an Android application that leverages on-device sensors to provide monitoring and protection of physical spaces. Haven turns any Android phone into a motion, sound, vibration and light detector, watching for unexpected guests and unwanted intruders. We designed Haven for investigative journalists, human rights defenders, and people at risk of forced disappearance to create a new kind of herd immunity. By combining the array of sensors found in any smartphone, with the world’s most secure communications technologies, like Signal and Tor, Haven prevents the worst kind of people from silencing citizens without getting caught in the act.

 

Safety through Sensors

Haven only saves images and sound when triggered by motion or volume, and stores everything locally on the device. You can position the device’s camera to capture visible motion, or set your phone somewhere discreet to just listen for noises. Get secure notifications of intrusion events instantly and access the logs remotely or anytime later.

 

The follow sensors are monitored for a measurable change, and then recorded to an event log on the device:

 

• Accelerometer: phone’s motion and vibration
  
• Camera: motion in the phone’s visible surroundings from front or back camera
  
• Microphone: noises in the environment
  
• Light: change in light from ambient light sensor
  
• Power: detect device being unplugged or power loss
  

 

 

 

Edited December 26, 2017 by Arthur

[Jamman960]

I saw this yesterday and wondered whether it’d be useful for server room security/monitoring if sensitive enough to pickup beeps etc over the fans

[Arthur]

I saw this yesterday and wondered whether it’d be useful for server room security/monitoring if sensitive enough to pickup beeps etc over the fans

Interesting idea. I guess that would work if the beeps are louder than (or different from) the noise level threshold you set initially?

Edited December 23, 2017 by Arthur