Hacking Xfinity's Home Security Cameras

I have a series of webcams running, one of which is monitored by Motion, a motion detection system. When Motion sees activity on the camera, it starts recording it to a flash video file with a snapshot, and I have hacked together a dirty webpage that allows navigating the recorded archives. A cron job handles cleanup by deleting everything older than 3 days.

Recently, we got an Xfinity Home Security system installed. I've done some research and determined that the sensors work on the ZigBee protocol (which is pretty common for home security sensors) and a second (locked down) Wifi network. The Wifi network appears to be used to connect the touchscreen (Android based, pretty sure it's a rebranded iControl device) to the wireless cameras (iCamera-1000), and to allow remote access to the touchscreen for settings, monitoring, and alerts sent by the touchscreen.

So my wife wants to put one of the cameras pointing at our front door, and record people who come to the door. The Xfinity system would actually support this, but only in a limited sense and only by combining the camera with a motion sensor -- the system can be configured to record a video clip when the motion sensor triggers. But I don't want to waste a motion sensor (nor am I sure that the IR sensor would function properly outdoors in the cold). Given that I already have a system capable of detecting motion and recording it, I wanted to integrate the new camera(s) into that system.

But Xfinity doesn't want me in that "security router". The don't give you the admin credentials to access the router, nor do they even give you the WPA2 key for the Wifi network. But it turns out that I can add a NIC to my firewall/router running Linux and just plug that into the back of the security router. It happily obtains a DHCP address from the security router, and is able to communicate with the cameras! I needed to run tcpdump and access the cameras from the remote Xfinity app to sniff the HTTP (Basic Authentication) username and password, but was able to access the camera from Motion after that.

Based on the web page that the camera serves up, it's capable of streaming H.264 and MJPEG, but Motion only supports MJPEG, I think. I might experiment with H.264 at some point to see if I can get it working, but for now I'm happy with what I've got.

I'm hoping that I'll be able to eventually set up some sort of monitoring for sensor status and/or alarm status. One of the detractions of the Xfinity system is that the touchscreen is the only device with "speakers" and if it's situated in a remote part of the house (ours is usually upstairs in the master bedroom) it can't be heard throughout the house. Our is barely audible in the living room but impossible to hear from the basement (where I spend most of my time). I'd like to be able to have my PC "chime" when the sensors get tripped so I'll know if one of the kids is opening doors. But so far, I haven't been able to see any network activity between the control box and the world at large...