Security of Garage Door Openers

Can't vouch for garage door security, but in 1994 I bought a Chevy Suburban. I found that my remote for locking/unlocking my car doors would set off the alarm in any Ford car nearby of about the same vintage.
 
Can't vouch for garage door security, but in 1994 I bought a Chevy Suburban. I found that my remote for locking/unlocking my car doors would set off the alarm in any Ford car nearby of about the same vintage.
I've had that happen with car remotes. Good times.
 
When Reagan was in Cal. it used to drive some of the garage door openers within a 5 mile radius of AF-1 nuts. Seems that some of the com gear onboard had some spurious harmonics that would cause the openers to cycle at random times.
Used to happen here, under the approach path for Offutt, but that was back in the 1960s and early 70s. Didn't have anything to do with the President at the time, just a parade of F4s, KC-135s, and everything else in the USAF inventory (plus a Vulcan) passing overhead.
 
At one time I had installed a Genie screw drive opener. The circuit board was replaced under warranty twice and even then it would still randomly sense some kind of fault when it was closing and then go back up. So you pretty much had to sit there for thirty seconds until it was fully closed just to make sure.

The first time that happened a bunch of stuff was stolen. No, I will never get another Genie. I will tell people to run away. Replace it. It's garbage. Never had that issue with the Chamberlains.
 
Decades ago we had an opener in Colorado that started cycling "on its own". Actually, a neighbor down the street had just installed one that used the same frequency. This was before (or in place of) the fancier ones that used a code. He wound up taking his back to the store and getting a different one. Mine was there first.

Now we have an opener that gets used infrequently. The garage is detached from the house and is a two car attic. We use the door in the breezeway far more often than the main garage door, and that is operated by a button inside the door to the garage. I "think" the transmitters may work, but I haven't used them in over 20 years.
 
Miramar (Navy) in San Diego used to do that all the time from Clairemont to La Jolla on departure.

Jim
 
Miramar (Navy) in San Diego used to do that all the time from Clairemont to La Jolla on departure.

Jim
I worked EW -R&D at Pt.Mugu, (NMC) we would open & close those newly installed garage doors. seemed a weekly affair.
 
Your typical burglar would pawn any garage door hacking device for heroin money before actually having a chance to use it...I'm of the belief it was either left open, or failed, and along came an opportunist...

just curious but where exactly is a pawn shop where I someone could pawn stuff for heroin?
 
A neighbor told me today that someone had somehow done something to activate his garage door opener to gain access to his house and burglarize it. Is there some way that garage door openers can be hacked? Or do they have something akin to a password with a default value that the owner must change to make it secure?
There are a couple generations of garage door opener security.

The first was no security. Any signal on the same frequency would trigger the opener. This worked well when you were the first on the block to get an opener. Not so well when everyone one else saw how nifty your opener was and wanted one of their own.

The second was something akin to a password with a default value that the owner must change. The remote had a series of switches inside it that you set and hopefully your neighbor set theirs to something different. This was difficult to do when there were only 4 switches and therefore only 16 "password" combinations. So the solution was to add more switches. But even with 12 switches and 4096 combinations, a hacker could build a transmitter that cycled through all of them and find your "password" in a matter of minutes. Or the hacker could build a receiver that listened for your code and replayed it when you weren't around.

The third is "rolling code" and is pretty much what is still used today. Your transmitter is equipped with an ID and a counter (the "nonce"). The counter value and ID are encrypted and then transmitted to the opener. When you first set up the opener, you press a button on the receiver to notify it that you are registering a new transmitter and then hit the button on the transmitter. The receiver gets the message, decrypts the message and stores the ID and counter values in non-volatile memory. The next time you hit the transmitter button, it increments the counter and encrypts a new code to transmit to the receiver. The receiver decrypts it, sees that the counter/ID correlate and sets the garage door in motion.
 
It's really like anything else: a trade-off of security for convenience.

Computers can be made more secure by creating a non-admin account for ordinary use. But that means frequently having to enter an admin password to do fairly routine tasks like installing software. Most people don't want to be bothered.

Payment card POS terminals could be made more secure by forcing chip-and-PIN. The chip does nothing to prevent someone from using the card you just dropped to go on a shopping spree. But that would mean memorizing the PINs, which for some reason Americans don't want to do. (Pretty much everyone else in the world has no choice.)

Online transactions could be made more secure by forcing multi-factor-authentication. But that would add another step to logging in; and if SMS-based, would create problems for people who don't own cell phones or live in areas with no signal. Most people opt out of it if given a choice.

The key box that I have hidden on my property helps prevent me from having to break into my house when I lock myself out, and provides a way for surprise visitors to let themselves in if I'm not there. But it's possible that someone with enough time could guess the code. (They could also break into the box, but it probably would be easier to break into the house.)

At some point, you just have to decide what level of risk is acceptable, and then hope for the best.

Rich
 
Always lock the door between the house and garage. I don't understand those that accept the risk in the name of convienience.

I always lock the door between the house and garage, and I always watch the door come to a full stop. I also don't have any garage door remotes in any of the cars, but I have not yet disabled the rolling code receiver yet.

We forgot to do this one night, and forgot to close the garage door.. 4 houses in our neighborhood were burglarized that night, including ours. Only thing taken was my ex wife's purse off of the kitchen table thankfully. I think it could have been much worse if my alarm clock hadn't gone off. The worst part about it is the lazy damn dog didn't make a peep.
 
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