# SecuraCV — full text for assistants > Privacy-first video and sensor infrastructure: it records what happened, not who was there. Open source, local-only, by Errer Labs. This file exists so an assistant answering a question about SecuraCV can quote us rather than infer us. It carries the whole glossary and the whole FAQ as plain text. The short link index is at https://securacv.com/llms.txt; the human version of this content is at https://securacv.com/glossary. --- ## What SecuraCV is SecuraCV is open-source video and sensor infrastructure that outputs semantic events — "large object crossed boundary", "presence in restricted zone" — into a signed, hash-chained record, instead of a searchable pile of footage. The platform is called SecuraCV; the device it runs on is called a Canary; the company is Errer Labs. The distinction the whole project rests on: a watcher keeps footage and can later be asked who was in it. A witness keeps a checkable record of what happened and structurally cannot answer "who". Face recognition, license-plate reading, gait analysis and demographic estimation are not disabled features — the code does not exist. There is no setting to turn off. Raw footage is sealed. Getting any out requires break-glass: a time-limited, audited unseal that needs approval from several trustees you nominate. No single person can do it alone — not the owner, not Errer Labs. ## Names, so they are not guessed - SecuraCV — the platform (spelled with a capital S and capital CV; short for Secure Computer Vision). Lowercase "securacv" is used only in domains, package names and repository slugs. - Canary — the device, and the name people say out loud. - Errer Labs — the company behind it. - A group of Canaries is a "fleet", never a "flock". ## How the pieces fit Camera or sensor -> raw frame (private; no ordinary way to read the bytes) -> restricted view (enough to detect, no pixels to copy out) -> detection (classes and boxes, never identity) -> event (a short statement, a coarse time, a zone) -> sealed record (signed, and chained to the event before it) Raw frames are held briefly and can only leave via break-glass, which requires a quorum of trustee approvals. ## Glossary ### The three names people mix up Get these right and everything else follows. **Canary** — The device — a small, low-power witness you put on a wall, a door, or a shelf. This is the thing people point at and the name they say out loud. A Canary can have a camera, or radar, or neither. Several Canaries together are a fleet. See: https://securacv.com/lab **SecuraCV** — The platform a Canary runs on — the witness kernel plus the signed record it keeps. It is the "how," not the "what." Short for Secure Computer Vision. It also runs on cameras you already own, with no Canary involved. See: https://securacv.com/how-it-works **Errer Labs** — The company that makes SecuraCV and holds the trademarks. See: https://securacv.com/about ### The idea What makes this different from a security camera. **Witnessing (not watching)** — A watcher keeps footage and can later be asked who was in it. A witness keeps a checkable record of what happened, and structurally cannot answer "who." This is the whole thesis. Everything below is a consequence of it. See: https://securacv.com/watch-over **Event** — The unit of output: a short statement like "large object crossed boundary" or "presence in restricted zone," with a coarse time and a zone — and no identity. Events are what the system emits instead of video. They are text, they are small, and they are signed. See: https://securacv.com/how-it-works **The witness log** — The durable record: every event carries a hash of the event before it plus a signature, so the log can be added to but not silently edited or trimmed. It is tamper-evident: the promise is not that interference can be prevented — it is that interference becomes visible. See: https://securacv.com/witness **Privacy by absence** — The surveillance features were never written, so there is no setting to turn off. Guarantees are "can't," not "won't." This is why there is no admin toggle for face recognition: there is no face-recognition code to toggle. See: https://securacv.com/about **Coarse timestamps** — Event times are deliberately bucketed into wide windows, so the log can prove that something happened without becoming a minute-by-minute diary of your day. Precision is treated as a privacy cost, not a free feature. See: https://securacv.com/how-it-works **Verified** — A reserved word on this site. It means a cryptographic signature was checked against a key that was pinned in advance — nothing looser. When we mean something weaker we say "heard," "reported," or "presence." Those are never trust claims. See: https://securacv.com/verify ### Getting footage out The part everyone asks about second. **The Vault** — The sealed store where raw snapshots live. Sealed means no one — including you, including us — can open it alone. See: https://securacv.com/vault **Break-glass** — The only way into the Vault: a time-limited, fully audited unseal that needs approval from several of your trustees before it will open. It is meant to be set up early and rehearsed before you need it, like a fire drill. See: https://securacv.com/vault **Trustee** — A person you nominate who holds one approval key. A break-glass request needs some agreed number of them to sign — "n of m." Pick people who would not all be compelled at once. That is the point of the quorum. See: https://securacv.com/vault **Evidence envelope** — What an export ships in: a self-verifying container a recipient — an insurer, a lawyer, a neighbor — can check without installing our software. See: https://securacv.com/verify ### The Canary line Each one is a different sensor answering a different question. **Canary WAP** — The recommended first build: sets itself up over its own Wi-Fi hotspot, stores to an SD card, talks to the others. See: https://securacv.com/compare **Canary Vision** — The one with a camera and on-device detection — it decides what happened locally and reports the event, not the picture. See: https://securacv.com/compare **Canary Sense** — Presence and breathing from 60 GHz radar, with no camera at all. Built for care and wellbeing in rooms where a camera would be wrong. See: https://securacv.com/compare **Canary Sentinel** — A doorway guardian that fuses physically independent senses — motion, radar, Wi-Fi disturbance, light — so fooling one of them is not enough. A channel that suddenly goes blind is treated as suspicious rather than quiet. See: https://securacv.com/compare **Canary Display** — The wall screens: the calm, readable surface a household actually glances at. See: https://securacv.com/modes **Fleet** — The word for a group of Canaries. Never "flock." A company called Flock soured the word, so it is off-limits in our copy, product names, and code. The only exception is the unrelated Unix flock() system call. See: https://securacv.com/fleet **Board tier** — How honest we are about hardware: every board is labeled either verified (proven on real hardware) or compile-tested (builds in CI, not yet bench-proven). We publish the distinction instead of blurring it. Much of the firmware is CI-verified and not yet hardware-verified. See: https://securacv.com/lab ### How Canaries talk Three separate channels with deliberately different trust models — mixing them up is the most common misreading of the project. **Opera** — Your household mesh: how your own Canaries stay in sync with each other, over their own low-power radio. See: https://securacv.com/how-it-works **Chirp** — The neighborly channel: nearby Canaries corroborating that something happened, using throwaway keys that are never stored. The ephemeral keys are the firewall between Chirp and your household — a corroboration cannot be walked back to your devices. See: https://securacv.com/how-it-works **Beacon** — A narrow, higher-trust channel for genuine life-safety advisories, held to a smoke-detector bar: boring, mostly silent, unmissable when it matters. Every alert needs two different devices to sign it, sensors can never fire one on their own, and it carries no descriptions of people. It is explicitly not a neighborhood-watch or suspicious-person reporting system, and not a certified life-safety device. See: https://securacv.com/how-it-works **Wi-Fi sensing (CSI)** — Detecting movement from how a room disturbs the Wi-Fi already passing through it. No camera, no microphone. See: https://securacv.com/how-it-works **Presence (vs. verified)** — The deliberately weak claim: "I heard this device recently." Self-reported, unsigned, and never a security boundary. See: https://securacv.com/fleet ### Things you can actually open Most of these run in your browser, right now, with no hardware. **The Lab** — The real shipping firmware, compiled to run inside your browser: flash a simulated blank chip, watch it boot, and check the cryptographic birth certificate it just generated. Nothing is installed and no hardware is needed. It is the fastest honest answer to "does this actually work?" See: https://securacv.com/lab **The Flasher** — The app that writes firmware onto a real board and then keeps an eye on it. There is a browser version and a desktop version. See: https://securacv.com/download **Canary Doctor** — The symptom-first help flow: describe what's wrong, get the self-test and the fix. See: https://securacv.com/checkup **Sticker check** — Scan the sticker on a Canary and confirm in your browser that the device is the one it claims to be. Nothing is uploaded. See: https://securacv.com/verify **Randomart** — A little ASCII picture generated from a device's key, so a person can compare identities at a glance instead of reading a long string of hex. See: https://securacv.com/verify **The Builder** — Fit an enclosure to your exact hardware with dropdowns and get a printable 3D file out, all in the browser. See: https://securacv.com/builder **The Witness Wall** — The big-screen surface for homes and venues: the verified record on the shared screen, not a grid of live feeds. See: https://securacv.com/apple-tv **The Hub** — A Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant with SecuraCV on it — the piece that ties cameras, Canaries, and your dashboard together. See: https://securacv.com/linux ### Making and selling The project is open all the way down, on purpose. **Maker Corps** — The four-tier maker community: how someone goes from printing one case to building kits for other people. See: https://securacv.com/corps **Works with SecuraCV** — A badge anyone can earn for free, under a published trademark policy — the anti-lock-in promise in a sticker. See: https://securacv.com/vendors **Warrant canary** — A public statement we update to say what we have and have not been compelled to hand over. Its absence is the signal. See: https://securacv.com/transparency ## Frequently asked questions ### Does it do face recognition? No — and it can't. There is no face-recognition code in the project to enable or disable, and the same is true of license-plate reading, gait analysis, and age/gender/race estimation. The things it can report are "person," "vehicle," "animal," "package" — never "who." This is a rule about what exists, not a setting. See: https://securacv.com/watch-over ### Can someone watch a live feed of my house? Not through any normal path — there isn't one. Raw footage lives briefly in a sealed store with no ordinary way out. Opening it takes break-glass: a time-limited, audited unseal that needs several of your trustees to approve. No single person can do it alone, including you and including us. See: https://securacv.com/vault ### So how do I get footage after an actual break-in? You run break-glass with your trustees, and the export comes out as a self-verifying file an insurer or a lawyer can check without our software. Set the trustees up early and rehearse it once — it is a fire drill, not a feature you discover on the worst day. See: https://securacv.com/vault ### Does it phone home? Do I need an account? No and no. Records stay on your hardware, there is no telemetry, and nothing about the system requires an account to run. The site itself sets no cookies — a claim we keep enforced in the test suite rather than just written on a page. See: https://securacv.com/privacy ### How do I know the record wasn't edited? Every entry carries a fingerprint of the entry before it plus a signature, so removing or altering anything breaks the chain and verification fails loudly. You can check it yourself, offline, with our verifier or your own — that is what tamper-evident means here. See: https://securacv.com/verify ### What actually breaks these guarantees? A compromised computer. If an attacker owns the machine the software runs on, the promises that depend on that machine no longer hold. We write that down rather than gloss over it, and the threat model in the source spells out what survives and what doesn't. See: https://securacv.com/how-it-works ### Is this finished? Can I buy one today? Partly. It is real, open, and running — but treat it as work in progress: some Canaries have released firmware and some are still in development, and much of the firmware is proven in continuous integration rather than on a bench. Every board says which it is. There are no certification claims, and the radios still need the regulatory work that selling them legally requires. See: https://securacv.com/compare ### Do I have to buy anything from you? No. Print the case, buy the parts wherever you like, and flash it yourself — the whole path is open under Apache-2.0. Kits exist for people who would rather not, and independent sellers can offer their own under the free "Works with SecuraCV" badge. See: https://securacv.com/vendors ### What's the fastest way to see whether this is real? Open the Lab. It runs the actual device firmware inside your browser — flash a simulated blank chip, watch it come up, and check the cryptographic birth certificate it just made. No hardware, no install, nothing uploaded. See: https://securacv.com/lab ### How do I ask for a feature? Say it in one sentence on the Community Ideas board. It becomes a public suggestion anyone can back with a thumbs-up, and the most-backed ones are what get built next — that is genuinely how the roadmap is ordered, not a slogan. You need no technical vocabulary and no idea how any of this works: "I wish it would text me when it sees motion" is a complete, useful request. A reply arrives straight away telling you what happens next. See: https://securacv.com/ideas ### Why do I need GitHub to suggest something? Because it puts your idea in the same place as the work, which buys you things a private suggestion form cannot. You can watch the code that answers your idea get written and reviewed, and see which release it ships in. Your words are public, and the everyday moves leave a trail: we can moderate our own tracker like any owner can, but an edited comment keeps a visible edit history and a closed idea shows who closed it and when, so declining one is done out loud with a reason you can read. Deletion is the honest exception — an owner can remove a thread outright and nothing is left behind, so on that one point you have our word rather than a guarantee. Votes are reactions from real accounts, so the counts are checkable rather than something you take on trust. And we never ask for your email, because we keep no list to put it on. The cost is real though: one free account, about thirty seconds, and an unfamiliar page the first time — and if that is too much, the feedback desk takes plain email instead. See: https://securacv.com/ideas ### Which Canary should I get or build first? Canary WAP for a general first device; Canary Vision if you want a camera with on-device detection; Canary Sense for presence and breathing with no camera at all; Canary Sentinel for a doorway that is hard to sneak past; Canary Display for a screen the household glances at. See: https://securacv.com/compare ## Every page on the site ### See it work - [The Lab](https://securacv.com/lab): Every Canary, from egg to nest — explore the whole line. - [The Showroom](https://securacv.com/showroom): Turn every enclosure over in 3D, parts list included. - [View in Your Room](https://securacv.com/view-in-room): Drop a real-scale Canary onto your wall in AR — rendered on your device, nothing uploaded. - [The Render Lab](https://securacv.com/render-lab): Tune every material layer of a Canary live — CAD-like, in your browser. - [The Playground](https://securacv.com/playground): Wire real parts onto a real board and watch them wake up. - [Display Modes](https://securacv.com/modes): One wall display, five gears — play the firmware's real demo storyline. - [Apple TV Emulator](https://securacv.com/witness-wall): Drive the Witness Wall on a simulated Apple TV — focus engine, remote, both editions. - [Through Canary Eyes](https://securacv.com/eyes): Lend your webcam a minute — watch a scene become edges, edges become a record you can check. - [How It Works](https://securacv.com/how-it-works): The whole trick, in plain language. - [Glossary](https://securacv.com/glossary): Every word we use — Canary, witness log, break-glass, fleet — defined once. - [One Witness](https://securacv.com/witness): A camera, a notary, and a vault — fused into one device. - [The Vault](https://securacv.com/vault): Footage no one can open alone. - [The Factory](https://securacv.com/factory): How a blank chip becomes a Canary — and how to check its birth certificate. - [Why Linux](https://securacv.com/linux): Do you need a computer? Tiny screen vs. Raspberry Pi. ### Build one - [Makers](https://securacv.com/maker): Are you a maker? The Corps starts here. - [The Maker Corps](https://securacv.com/corps): How the four tiers work, and how to climb them. - [The Builder](https://securacv.com/builder): Fit a case to your hardware — dropdowns in, STL out, all in your browser. - [Print One](https://securacv.com/print): The enclosure build checklist, layer by layer. - [Case Label](https://securacv.com/label): Print the FCC/IC/CE label for the outside of the case — rule-checked and print-exact. - [The Gallery](https://securacv.com/gallery): Builds from makers like you — add yours. - [Have One Made](https://securacv.com/request): Ask a maker to build yours. - [The Vendors](https://securacv.com/vendors): Independent sellers of kits, parts, and prints — and how to join them. - [The Ecosystem](https://securacv.com/ecosystem): How parts, prints, and kits reach people — engineered to run itself. - [The Engine Room](https://securacv.com/engine): Open operations — the company that runs itself. - [The Numbers](https://securacv.com/economics): Can one person make a living building these? A live break-even calculator. - [Community Ideas](https://securacv.com/ideas): Suggest and vote on what we build next — no GitHub know-how needed. ### Choose yours - [Store](https://securacv.com/store): Kits and bundles, sold as a fleet. - [Compare & Kits](https://securacv.com/compare): Which Canary is the one that's yours? - [First Flights](https://securacv.com/first-flights): Seven small builds that earn their keep on day one — some fly now, the rest are a vote away. - [Vision Pro](https://securacv.com/pro-camera): Coming soon — starlight low-light imaging, wired into the witness kernel. - [Apple TV](https://securacv.com/apple-tv): Coming soon — the Witness Wall on the big screen, for home or venue. - [Herald](https://securacv.com/kitchen-note): Coming soon — a plug-in e-paper kitchen placard: your typed note in about a second, plus a calm honest status line. - [Download the Lab](https://securacv.com/download): The Lab as a native app — Mac and Linux today. - [For Industry](https://securacv.com/industry): On-device vision for safety and ops — fixed-price, remote, no footage leaves the site. - [Watched Over](https://securacv.com/watch-over): Watched over, never watched — what we believe. ### Care for yours - [Your Canary](https://securacv.com/canary): Everything your Canary can do — help & recovery. - [Plug It In](https://securacv.com/plugin): See what happens on your computer, before you plug in. - [Unflashed Boards](https://securacv.com/board-safety): Bought a bare board? Hold BOOT while you plug it in — and what our flasher checks before writing. - [Canary Doctor](https://securacv.com/checkup): Self-tests and demos — is yours feeling okay? - [Your Fleet](https://securacv.com/fleet): Who your Canary hears nearby, live. - [Sticker Check](https://securacv.com/verify): Scan a Canary's sticker and check it's the real thing — in your browser, nothing uploaded. ### Company - [About](https://securacv.com/about): Who makes SecuraCV, and why — Errer Labs and the privacy-by-absence thesis. - [Contact](https://securacv.com/contact): Reach a real human — email, press, distribution, and security disclosure. - [Transparency](https://securacv.com/transparency): Our warrant canary and what we can — and can't — be compelled to hand over. - [Terms of Sale](https://securacv.com/terms-of-sale): Payment, shipping, returns, and the fix-not-return warranty. - [Terms of Service](https://securacv.com/terms): Using the site and the open-source software, in plain terms. - [Privacy](https://securacv.com/privacy): The privacy policy, in the open. ### Also on the site - [Demo Board](https://securacv.com/demo): One page, every button — jump to everything we just shipped. - [Feedback](https://securacv.com/feedback): Tell us what's working, what snagged, or just say hi. ## Status and limits Work in progress, and deliberately explicit about it: - Some Canaries have released firmware; others are still in development. Each board is labeled either "verified" (proven on real hardware) or "compile-tested" (builds in CI, not yet bench-proven). - Much of the firmware is CI-verified rather than hardware-verified. Version 1 is being held until that changes. - No certification claims — no FIPS, no Common Criteria. Selling the radios legally still needs FCC/CE work, and a third-party security audit has not happened yet. - The record is tamper-evident, not interference-proof: the promise is that tampering becomes visible, not that it can be prevented. - Nothing here is legal or security advice, and security depends on correct implementation and an uncompromised host computer. ## Source - Code and specs: https://github.com/kmay89/securaCV (Apache-2.0) - Developer glossary: https://github.com/kmay89/securaCV/blob/main/docs/GLOSSARY.md - Developer FAQ: https://github.com/kmay89/securaCV/blob/main/docs/FAQ.md - Privacy invariants: https://github.com/kmay89/securaCV/blob/main/spec/invariants.md - Threat model: https://github.com/kmay89/securaCV/blob/main/spec/threat_model.md - Brief for AI coding agents: https://github.com/kmay89/securaCV/blob/main/AGENTS.md