One of my many arguments for standardised protocols.  Why reinvent the wheel?  Especially when you make a round wheel square in the process.....

Totally agree. I know webway use a few in their stuff rather than recreate something that already existed.

It is almost always without exception a bad idea to "roll your own" encryption:

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/18197/why-shouldnt-we-roll-our-own

 

It's also a really bad idea to keep encryption schemes secret - the security should lie in the key, not the algorithm. If you keep it secret, the most clever person to look at it is going to be you. Make it public, and there is almost always someone more clever than you to take a look.

 

I partly understand why Technistore is like this - it was implemented for embedded systems 25 years ago. Even with that in mind, it's got issues.

but again technistore is just a reset algo. There are easy ways to reset a system than to hack it. It was originally a separate device that wired into the panel. It was then later added to panels as a built in function. Most panels don't even have a seed, ie castle, aritech etc. If you get hold of the software you can reset any panel.

Im not a fan of it and once we have all of our estate on udl we will be disabling it.

How does the UDL software authenticate with the panels?

Well depends. If using modems then we use dial back and they call the office, either from a remote request or the customer pressing the relevant buttons. On the higher security stuff we use webways and the data is sent over an ssh tunnel.

Just for clarity Aritech ATS does use seed codes, Aritech CD does not.

ok 0-255?

ok 0-255?

000001 - 999999

wow, useless point scored there for the ats

wow, useless point scored there for the ats

I thought it a bit strange having such a big number. No idea why it is so.