Plug-and-Play Remote Access

@ivelin wrote:

I’ve been using Home Assistant for about a year now. Needless to say, great potential!

One of the areas of friction for me has been remote access. Users currently have two options:

1. Go through a non-trivial and often brittle setup with port-forwarding, TLS tunneling, and dynamic DNS.
2. Use Nabu Casa Remote Access Cloud.

I think the latter is a completely reasonable way to make things simple for the end user and support the sustainability of the project.

However as the documentation states, there are a few quirks in the implementation that slightly contradict the core promise of user data privacy, because a cloud service sits in the middle of user data traffic. Although its encrypted end to end, there is a minimal risk of someone hacking into the server and mounting a man-in-the-middle attack.

So I’ve done some homework and I think I found a possible improvement. The gist of the proposed solution takes advantage of WebRTC DataChannel - a peer-to-peer communication API that has been long coming and finally all major browsers support.

I’ve been able to use this solution for a side project of mine for several weeks now with other users reporting good results. Here is a technical article published by WebRTCHacks:
https://webrtchacks.com/private-home-surveillance-with-the-webrtc-datachannel/

And a higher level overview blog:
https://blog.ambianic.ai/2020/02/05/pnp.html

If there is interest, I am happy to help with an implementation for Home Assistant Remote Access.

Ivelin

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