ZoneMinder is a fantastic Linux video camera security and surveillance solution dosierung cialis. I have a ZoneMinder installation at home that I use to monitor a few IP-based video cameras.

My ZoneMinder installation uses the built-in authentication system, which means that only authenticated users can access the system.

One problem with using the built-in authentication system, however, is that it makes it hard to access video from the cameras from outside of ZoneMinder. For example, if I wanted to take a snapshot from a shell script of what one of the ZoneMinder cameras is currently recording, that would not be very easy to accomplish because the shell script would have to somehow log in first, establish a fake web browsing session (session cookie, etc.), and then finally request the snapshot.

Fortunately, ZoneMinder offers a way to accomplish this without too much hassle via a  feature called “hash logins”, which is enabled by setting the option ZM_AUTH_HASH_LOGINS (Options->System->ZM_AUTH_HASH_LOGINS).

The way to use this is by appending a ‘&auth=<login hash>’ parameter to the ZoneMinder URL one wants to access. For example, running the following command would retrieve a snapshot (in JPEG format) from the camera with monitor ID 8:

shell$ curl 'http://www.example.comt/cgi-bin/nph-zms?mode=single&monitor=8&auth=d8b45b3cf3b24407d09cbc16123f3549' -o /tmp/snapshot.jpg
 % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
 100 22813  100 22813    0     0   9488      0  0:00:02  0:00:02 --:--:--  9485

The only complicated part here is knowing how to generate the hash used in the “auth” parameter. This does not seem to be documented anywhere, nor could I find any examples, but a quick read of the ZoneMinder code provided the necessary clues: The hash is calculated by the function getAuthUser() in the file includes/functions.php like this:

$time = localtime( $now );
$authKey = ZM_AUTH_HASH_SECRET.$user['Username'].$user['Password'].$remoteAddr.$time[2].$time[3].$time[4].$time[5];
$authHash = md5( $authKey );

ZM_AUTH_HASH_SECRET is a string chosen by the user via ZoneMinder options. $user[‘Username’] and $user[‘Password’] come from the ‘Users’ table in the ZoneMinder database — getAuthUser() will iterate over all existing users trying to find a match. $time contains the local time and $time[2], $time[3], $time[4], and $time[5] contain the current hour, day of the month, month and year, respectively. The code tries to find a match in the last two hours (in other words a login hash will found to be valid for up to two hours).

A simple test program to generate the hash looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/php
 <?php
 //
 // Needs ZM_OPT_USE_AUTH and ZM_AUTH_HASH_SECRET and ZM_AUTH_HASH_LOGINS.
 // Better not to use ZM_AUTH_HASH_IPS as this will break authentication
 // when client is behind NAT because the IP address of the client is used
 // to calculate the hash if ZM_AUTH_HASH_IPS is set.
 //
 $time = localtime();
 $authKey = 'mykey' . 'myuser' . '*0945FE11CAC14C0A4A72A01234DD00388DE250EC' . $time[2] . $time[3] . $time[4] . $time[5];
 echo "\$authKey = $authKey\n";
 $authHash = md5($authKey);
 echo "\$authHash = $authHash\n";
 ?>

Note that the hashed password for the user needs to be provided to the script (the user password is passed through the MySQL PASSWORD() function to finally obtain the password hash that is stored in the ZoneMinder database).

How to make practical use of all this? A script could generate the login hash and then access some part of ZoneMinder via an HTTP request. One could use this, for example, in a script run via cron every few minutes to take snapshots to produce a time-lapse video. This is left as an exercise for the reader.