The Signal Report // LUXURY HOME SECURITY
Luxury Home Security.
High-end residential and estate security, from cameras and RF to physical protection. All reports →
30 in this beat · page 1 of 3
What a perimeter alarm rate leaves out
Estate perimeter systems are sold on detection and false-alarm numbers. A federal prison-perimeter spec shows what those numbers hide: false and nuisance alarms are different things, a sensor alarming ten times an hour drops out of the alarm rate into downtime, and detection has to be proven on site. What to ask before you buy.
Read the report → Report 173 · Luxury Home Security · 2026-10-02 · 7 minWhat a lock's grade actually measures
Grade 1 is best. On BHMA's residential label, A is best. On high-security cylinders, C is best. The biggest difference between commercial grades is how many cycles the lock survives, and picking and drilling live in a separate standard. What each rating tests, and what none of them cover.
Read the report → Report 167 · Luxury Home Security · 2026-09-29 · 7 minWhat hands-free unlock is really measuring
The new Aliro smart-lock standard reserves hands-free unlock for ultra-wideband ranging, and it really does beat the relay attack NCC Group used on a Bluetooth lock in 2022. But a peer-reviewed USENIX paper shortened UWB distance measurements from 12 m to 0 m with a $65 device, at rates far above what access control is built to tolerate. What that means for an exterior door.
Read the report → Report 160 · Luxury Home Security · 2026-09-24 · 7 minThe burglar stat that was never about cameras
The "60% of burglars avoid homes with cameras" line comes from a 2012 survey question about alarms. In the same survey, about four in ten burglars said cameras would put them off, behind people being home. The largest CCTV review finds a modest effect, bigger with active monitoring and never as a stand-alone.
Read the report → Report 155 · Luxury Home Security · 2026-09-21 · 9 minWhat it takes for a camera to identify someone
Camera boxes sell resolution. The UK Home Office measures something else: how much of the recorded frame a person fills. Identification needs roughly 400 lines from head to toe, so a 4K camera has to be framed tightly at the gate, and the recording, not the live view, is the one that counts.
Read the report → Report 149 · Luxury Home Security · 2026-09-18 · 11 minSecurity glass is rated in blows, not minutes
Glass is a delay device, so the useful unit is time. The two ratings quoted most often, EN 356 and UL 972, count dropped steel balls and controlled axe blows instead, and a UK museum specification says outright that EN 356 does not classify glass by tools or by time available to an intruder. The standard that does count minutes reports three numbers per product, and the rating belongs to the frame and glazing assembly rather than the pane.
Read the report → Report 143 · Luxury Home Security · 2026-09-12 · 10 minM50 is only half a crash rating
Estate gates and bollards get sold on a code: M50, M30, or the older K12. Every one of those is half of a pair. The other half is a penetration band that runs, across products on the government's own approved list, from under three feet to 98.4 feet of travel into your property. Two federal documents publish the whole table for free, and one government list shows the same M30 designation covering both extremes.
Read the report → Report 137 · Luxury Home Security · 2026-09-09 · 9 minWhat your gate fob actually says
Federal guidance says legacy access credentials hand a reader an identifying number and, in most cases, cannot answer a cryptographic challenge. That single fact explains why a copy works. The second question, the one nobody asks, is how close somebody has to stand to take the number in the first place, and there the physics is on the owner's side.
Read the report → Report 131 · Luxury Home Security · 2026-09-06 · 9 minWhen CISA downgrades an advisory
CISA published a 9.1-out-of-10 advisory about a hardcoded password in a smart-lock app, and the coverage said attackers could remotely unlock doors. Eight weeks later the same advisory read 4.3. How to read a CVSS vector instead of its score, and why the three years the vendor spent not answering a researcher is the finding no revision touched.
Read the report → Report 125 · Luxury Home Security · 2026-09-03 · 9 minYour Camera May Not Ask for a Password
Read three 2026 CISA advisories side by side and the defining failure is not a coding mistake. One camera answers unauthenticated snapshot requests on an open endpoint. One has an undocumented port that hands over account credentials. One ships hard-coded keys identical on every unit. You cannot patch a design decision.
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