SmartestHome/identity

identity

The household's person <-> BLE-identifier registry, from Phase 6 of the project plan. Solves two concrete problems in one design:

1. Multiple phones per person (the classic private/work phone situation).
2. MAC address spoofing/randomization, so registration can't be tricked or accidentally fed garbage by a phone's own privacy features.
3. People with no device at all (a grandmother without a smartphone, a one-off guest) — the system stays useful instead of just not knowing they exist.

Also backs the "who's home" and "register me" pieces of hosts/door-panel/ and hosts/kitchen-display/, and proxies the household weather topic those two dashboards both need.

The model

A person has zero or more identifiers. An identifier is a Home Assistant entity_id that resolves presence for one physical device. That's the entire schema (server.py's people/identifiers tables) — multi-phone support isn't a special case, it falls straight out of it: register once with your private phone, register again later with your work phone in hand, same spoken name, and you now have two identifiers under one person.

Anti-spoofing — the actual security boundary

A raw Bluetooth MAC address is never accepted as an identifier by itself, especially not a randomized one (the iOS/Android default — a phone's advertised MAC rotates every few minutes specifically so it can't be tracked as a stable identifier by anyone, including this system). Registration only ever looks at entity_ids matching TRUSTED_ENTITY_PREFIXES — meant to contain only:

• Home Assistant's Private BLE Device integration entities (Bermuda/HA resolve the rotating MAC back to a stable identity via the device's IRK — a cryptographic resolution, not string-matching a MAC), or
• manually provisioned fixed-MAC BLE tag entities (a physical tag handed to a person specifically because its MAC doesn't rotate).

An attacker broadcasting an arbitrary spoofed MAC never produces a trusted candidate — it just doesn't show up in TRUSTED_ENTITY_PREFIXES at all, because the untrusted raw entity is a different entity_id than the resolved one. Spoofing a specific person's resolved identity would require their device's actual IRK secret, a materially higher bar than MAC spoofing. This is a defense against passive/ opportunistic spoofing, not a claim of cryptographic non-repudiation — if a household member's phone (and its IRK) is itself compromised, this system has no way to know that. Threat-model it as "keeps a stranger's phone from registering itself as you," not "biometric-grade proof of identity."

Never auto-commit on ambiguity

If a registration attempt finds zero, more than one, or an already-claimed candidate, nothing is written. The caller gets a reason back (and, for the ambiguous case, the candidate list) and a human disambiguates on the touchscreen — calling POST /register again with an explicit entity_id. The one case that does commit within a single call is the clean one (exactly one trusted, unclaimed candidate) — because the spoken "register me as <name>" command is the human confirmation; requiring a second round-trip for the unambiguous case would be pure friction with no safety benefit. This mirrors, rather than weakens, this project's existing "an identity merge must never auto-commit silently" rule: ambiguity is exactly the case that still needs a person.

The photo is an audit trail, not face recognition

POST /register/photo stores whatever the calling kiosk's camera captured at registration time, purely as a "who did this, when" reference photo — it is never run through any face-matching or biometric pipeline. Building that would mean either standing up a new ML pipeline from scratch or wiring this device's camera into Frigate's existing face recognition (Phase 5) as a second camera source — both real, both out of scope for this pass. BLE/IRK resolution, not the camera, is what actually decides who's registering. If you want camera-based identity later, Frigate's own face-recognition + enrollment (0.16+) is the piece to wire in, not a new pipeline here.

People without a device

Two paths, distinct on purpose because they solve different problems:

• A known person with no device (the grandmother case) — POST /register with "no_device": true and a real name. Skips candidate lookup entirely; creates the person (or reuses them by name, same dedup as the normal path) with zero identifiers. On the touchscreen this is the "I don't have a phone or tag" checkbox next to the name field; there's no voice phrasing for it yet (a boolean flag doesn't fit the single-utterance design cleanly — say it on the touchscreen for now). The long-term fix for this exact case is a physical fixed-address BLE tag (docs/components.md's "Fixed BLE tags" line) so they do get automatic presence eventually — this flag is what makes the household not have to wait for that before the person exists in the system at all.
• Someone the system doesn't need to identify (a one-off guest) — POST /register/guest, no name, no device. Always creates a new record ("Guest 1", "Guest 2", ...; never reused/deduped, unlike named people) — the touchscreen's "Add a guest" button. DELETE /people/<id> cleans up a stale one afterwards.

Neither path can ever resolve automatic presence (there's no identifier to check a state on) — that's what POST /presence/manual ({"person_id", "home"}) is for: a hand-operated Home/Away toggle, surfaced directly on hosts/door-panel/'s dashboard next to anyone with has_device: false in /presence's response. Until it's tapped at least once, /presence reports home: null ("unknown") for that person — never false, since defaulting a device-less person to "away" would be actively wrong the moment they're actually sitting in the next room, not just uninformative.

Floor-plan groundwork (not the floor plan itself)

/presence also reports a best-effort room per person (server.py's AREA_ATTRIBUTE, default area_id) — read from whichever HA area/room attribute your room-presence integration (Bermuda) attaches to a trusted entity's state, so a future floor-plan UI has live room-level data to plot without this service changing again. The floor plan itself — an image, a room<->coordinate mapping, any rendering — is deliberately not built here. There's no floor plan or fixed room list to design a coordinate format against yet; building one now would be guessing, not engineering. AREA_ATTRIBUTE's exact name is also a guess — verify it against a real Bermuda-tracked entity's attributes (Developer Tools -> States) before relying on room being populated at all; it degrades to null if missing, never breaks the response.

The admin panel

frontend/admin.html — the third page here, and the only one not designed for a kiosk. register.html and dashboard.html are big-touch-target screens running unattended on a wall; this one is dense, has destructive buttons, and is meant for a phone or laptop belonging to someone who sat down intending to administer something. A wall panel anyone can walk up to should not have a "Prune 6 people" button on it — that's why the admin page is a separate URL rather than a tab on the door panel, and why nothing in hosts/door-panel/ or hosts/kitchen-display/ links to it.

It's served by the same read-only identity-web nginx container as its siblings, and configured the same way:

http://<host>:8098/admin.html?api=http://<host>:8097&token=<IDENTITY_TOKEN>

Four tabs: People (tap anyone to edit every field, their devices, their door rights and their chores), Prune, History, and Access log.

The token is in the URL, exactly like the two kiosk pages — that's the existing pattern here, not a new decision, and it's why this service treats the token as the real boundary rather than network placement. Bookmark the admin URL somewhere private; anyone with it has full administrative access to the person registry.

Nicknames: people say them, the assistant doesn't

A person can have a nickname — what the household actually calls them. It is an input alias only:

• GET /resolve?q=bibi finds Linus. So does q=Linus. Registering a second phone as "Bibi" attaches it to Linus's existing record rather than creating a duplicate.
• Every payload also carries speak_name, which is always the real name. Voice/TTS consumers must read speak_name, never nickname. chores/ already does this for reminder text.

The asymmetry is the entire point of the field, not an implementation detail: a nickname is something people grant each other, and a machine reading it back is a different thing from a friend saying it. Assign one in the admin panel, and the assistant keeps calling them by their name.

A nickname may not collide with anyone else's name or nickname — the edit is refused with the conflicting person named. If a spoken string somehow matches two people anyway, registration refuses with reason: "ambiguous_name" rather than picking one, the same never-auto-commit-on-ambiguity rule as the BLE candidate case above.

Visit history — who was home when, and with whom

identity samples its own /presence every PRESENCE_POLL_SECONDS and writes arrival/departure rows. Nothing pushes events at it. Three deliberate consequences:

• The history is honest about its resolution. You know when someone was observed home, to within one poll interval.
• home: null (unknown) never writes anything. Not a visit, and — more importantly — never a departure. An HA outage or a device-less person nobody has toggled must not put a fake "left the house" into the record; an inferred absence written down as an observed one is a lie the log can never un-tell. An ha_unreachable sample is skipped in full.
• BLE flapping doesn't shred the log. A person has to read as away for DEPARTURE_GRACE_SECONDS before their visit closes, and the departure is recorded as of the last moment they were actually seen, not when that window ran out.

A visit that never gets a definite "not home" (the device-less, hand-toggled case) is eventually closed by VISIT_MAX_OPEN_HOURS with close_reason: "timed_out" rather than "departed" — the two are never conflated, and the admin panel labels the difference ("departure never observed").

"With whom" is a query, not a table. GET /co-presence overlaps visit intervals on read. There's no second copy of the same truth to drift out of sync, and a visit corrected later automatically corrects the co-presence answer. The tradeoff is stated plainly: it's O(visits²) within the window, which is fine for a household and would not be for a venue.

Pruning: the filter selects, the human deletes

"Select all that have last visited before <date>" is two endpoints on purpose:

1. GET /prune/candidates?last_visit_before=… — a read. Fills in the checkboxes.
2. POST /people/prune with {"person_ids": [...]} — deletes exactly the ids that came back and stayed ticked.

The filter is never re-run at delete time. Someone who walks in the door between "Select all" and "Delete selected" can't be swept up by a filter that quietly re-evaluated — the list you approved is the list that gets deleted. That's worth one extra round trip for an irreversible operation on people's records.

Someone with no recorded visits falls back to their created_at (flagged last_visit_is_estimated), so a person registered once and never seen again — the most prunable record there is — is findable rather than invisible to the filter.

Per-device rights — an answer, never an action

device_grants records that a person may operate a specific HA entity: the "let my cousin unlock the front door herself" case. GET /device-access answers yes/no with a reason.

This service never touches a device. It has no path to one. Home Assistant asks, Home Assistant acts — the same "HA mediates, nothing auto-acts" rule as every other control path in this project. The flow is: BLE/face resolves who's at the door → HA calls GET /device-access?person_id=…&entity_id=lock.front_door → HA calls lock.unlock if and only if the answer was allowed: true.

Deny is the default and the only fallback. No grant, unknown person, expired grant — all allowed: false. This is the one place here that fails closed rather than degrading gracefully: everything else in this service would rather report "unknown" than guess, but a lock has no useful "unknown", and the safe half of "open/don't open" is "don't".

Grants can carry an expires_at (a weekend key for a visiting cousin), checked at answer time rather than by a sweep, so a lapsed grant stops working the instant it lapses. Every check is logged to device_access_events, allowed and denied alike — for a door lock the denied ones are the interesting ones — and the admin panel's Access log tab shows them.

A worked HA example, unverified against a running instance like every other HA-side snippet in this repo:

# configuration.yaml (excerpt)
rest_command:
  identity_may_operate:
    url: "http://<container-host>:8097/device-access?person_id={{ person_id }}&entity_id={{ entity_id }}&via=door-panel"
    method: GET
    headers:
      Authorization: "Bearer !secret identity_token"

script:
  cousin_self_entry:
    sequence:
      - service: rest_command.identity_may_operate
        data:
          person_id: "{{ person_id }}"
          entity_id: lock.front_door
        response_variable: verdict
      # The lock is only ever touched inside this guard.
      - condition: template
        value_template: "{{ verdict.content.allowed }}"
      - service: lock.unlock
        target:
          entity_id: lock.front_door

Chore-system settings — owned here, used by chores/

Three per-person things live here, not in chores/. All of them are editable in the admin panel (which is what open decision #26 was waiting for), and chores/ reads all of them off the same GET /presence call it already made.

Assignment (POST /people/<id>/chore-assignments) says who owes which chore type. It's a strong preference, not a lock: an assignee who's home gets nudged instead of whoever's nearest, but an assignee who's away doesn't block the chore — the nudge falls through to whoever is around, because the house rule is still "I don't care who does it, as long as it gets done." CHORE_ASSIGNMENT_STRICT=true in chores.env flips that to waiting for the assignee instead. Litter can't be assigned to anyone, for the same reason it ignores exemptions — see below.

The other two fields, set via POST /people/<id>/chore-settings:

• chore_exempt — a household member who's tracked for presence/identity like anyone else but never nudged about chores in general (the "cousin visits often but doesn't owe me chores" case). Litter is the deliberate exception — chores/check.py's _EXEMPTIONS_DONT_APPLY still nudges an exempt person about putting trash they left out into the bin, because that responsibility isn't "doing a chore," it's cleaning up after yourself.
• chore_reminder_style — free text describing how a person wants to be reminded ("be assertive, don't let up" / "be gentle, give me a few minutes of grace"). chores/ passes this to an LLM that phrases the reminder message in that style — it never decides who or when to nudge, only how the words come out, per that system's own hard rule that presence/schedule drives every assignment decision (see chores/README.md). Empty/unset falls back to a plain, un-styled template with no LLM call at all.

Both of those live as columns on people (not a separate table) because they're household-standing facts about a person, same category as their name or photo — identity is already this project's source of truth for who someone is, so this is where "how do I relate to this specific household member" facts belong, not duplicated into chores/'s own database. Assignments get their own table only because they're many-per-person, not because they belong anywhere else.

Camera face recognition — a second presence signal, never a registration one

If Tapo pan/tilt cameras are wired into Frigate as additional camera sources (docs/project-plan.md Phase 20) and their faces are enrolled in Frigate's own 0.16+ face recognition, identity subscribes to FRIGATE_EVENTS_TOPIC (frigate/events by default) and treats a recognized name matching a registered person (case-insensitive) as a corroborating presence signal — home becomes true if either their BLE identifier reports present or their face was seen in the last FACE_PRESENCE_WINDOW_SECONDS. This is genuinely useful for the device-less case too (a grandmother with no phone can now show as home the moment a camera recognizes her, not just via the manual toggle).

It is never a registration signal — /register never reads _last_face_seen, and there's no path from "camera saw a face" to "a new person got created." That stays BLE/IRK-only and human-confirmed, per this file's "Anti-spoofing" section above; the camera can corroborate an existing person's presence, never mint a new identity.

sub_label = ["name", confidence] is Frigate's documented shape for object sub-labels generally (used for both face and license-plate recognition plugins); whether Frigate 0.16+'s specific face-recognition feature publishes into that exact field on frigate/events is not verified against a real deployment — a wrong topic or field name just means this signal never fires, degrading silently back to BLE/manual presence only.

Voice: single-utterance, not multi-turn

The whole flow is designed around one spoken sentence: "register me as <name>" — not a multi-turn conversation ("what's your name?" / reply / "confirm?"). This is deliberate: HA Assist's multi-turn/continue-conversation support is newer and more version-sensitive than a single custom-sentence intent with a captured {name} slot, and a one-shot command is materially more robust to build against. The tradeoff is explicit up front: say your name in the same breath as the command, or use the touchscreen's own form instead.

Nothing under this repo builds the HA-side wiring — same convention as digest-engine's/admin-canvas's HA integration points. You need, in Home Assistant's own config:

# configuration.yaml (excerpt) — a custom sentence + intent script that calls this
# service's /register endpoint. VERIFY against your own HA version; this is a worked
# example, not a tested one.
intent_script:
  RegisterPerson:
    speech:
      text: "{{ message }}"
    action:
      - service: rest_command.identity_register
        data:
          name: "{{ name }}"
          device_id: "{{ trigger.device_id | default('unknown') }}"
        response_variable: reg_result
      - variables:
          message: "{{ reg_result.content.message }}"

rest_command:
  identity_register:
    url: "http://<container-host>:8097/register"
    method: POST
    headers:
      Authorization: "Bearer !secret identity_token"
      Content-Type: "application/json"
    payload: '{"name": "{{ name }}", "device_id": "{{ device_id }}"}'

Plus a custom sentence file (custom_sentences/en/register.yaml) mapping "register me as {name}" to the RegisterPerson intent — see HA's custom sentences docs. The same IDENTITY_TOKEN from identity.env has to be pasted into HA's secrets.yaml by hand; there's no way for this repo to push it there for you.

Configure

cp identity/identity.env.example /opt/smart-home/identity/identity.env
openssl rand -hex 32   # IDENTITY_TOKEN
chmod 600 /opt/smart-home/identity/identity.env
$EDITOR /opt/smart-home/identity/identity.env

Two things that must be filled in with real values before this does anything useful:

• HA_TOKEN — a Long-Lived Access Token from HA's own UI (profile -> Security).
• TRUSTED_ENTITY_PREFIXES — the actual entity_id prefixes your Private BLE Device / fixed-tag setup produces. The shipped default (device_tracker.pble_,device_tracker.bletag_) is a plausible guess, not confirmed against a real HA instance — check Developer Tools -> States yourself.

API

All endpoints are bearer-token gated (Authorization: Bearer <IDENTITY_TOKEN>), including the GETs — same reasoning as pantry-vision: this service has a published port because kiosk browsers call it directly, so the token is the actual boundary, not network placement.

Endpoint	What it does
POST /register/photo	raw image bytes -> {"photo_id": "..."} — an audit artifact, and also becomes the person's profile picture (see below)
POST /register	{"name", "device_id", "photo_id"?, "entity_id"?, "no_device"?} -> registers, or returns a reason it couldn't (see above)
POST /register/guest	{"device_id", "photo_id"?} -> registers "Guest N", no name needed
GET /people	admin/audit list of every person: identifiers, device grants, chore assignments, nickname/speak_name, last_visit_at, visit_count, currently_home_since
POST /people/<id>	edit any editable field — {"name"?, "nickname"?, "note"?, "chore_exempt"?, "chore_reminder_style"?, "clear_photo"?}. Omitted keys are left alone
GET /people/<id>/photo	the person's profile picture (raw JPEG) — their most recent registration photo
POST /people/<id>/identifiers	{"entity_id"} — attach an identifier by hand (a fixed BLE tag not in range yet). Still enforces TRUSTED_ENTITY_PREFIXES
DELETE /people/<id>/identifiers/<id>	revoke a mistaken or compromised identifier
DELETE /people/<id>	remove a person entirely (their identifiers, grants and visits go with them)
GET /resolve?q=<spoken>	spoken name or nickname -> the canonical person, with speak_name (see below)
GET /prune/candidates?last_visit_before=<date>	everyone whose last visit predates that date — a read, it selects and never deletes
POST /people/prune	{"person_ids": [...]} — bulk delete by explicit id, never by filter (see below)
GET /people/<id>/visits, GET /visits	visit history; both take ?since=&limit=
GET /co-presence?person_id=&since=	who was home at the same time as whom, derived from overlapping visits
GET /device-access?person_id=&entity_id=&permission=&via=	may this person operate this device? -> {"allowed", "reason", ...}
POST /people/<id>/device-grants	{"entity_id", "permission"?, "expires_at"?, "note"?} — grant a right
DELETE /people/<id>/device-grants/<id>	revoke one
GET /device-access/events?limit=	the audit log of every access check, allowed and denied
GET/POST /people/<id>/chore-assignments	read/replace this person's assigned chore types ({"chore_types": [...]})
GET /chore-assignments	the same facts keyed by chore type — the shape chores/ reads
POST /presence/manual	{"person_id", "home"} — hand-operated Home/Away for anyone with no identifiers
POST /people/<id>/chore-settings	{"chore_exempt"?, "chore_reminder_style"?} — see below; either field omitted/null leaves it unchanged
GET /presence	{"people": [{"id", "name", "nickname", "speak_name", "home", "room", "has_device", "has_photo", "chore_exempt", "chore_reminder_style", "chore_assignments"}], "generated_at"} — home is true/false/null (unknown), room is best-effort floor-plan groundwork (see below)
GET /weather	proxies smarthome/weather/current, same JSON shape (temperature/condition/location) hosts/thin-client's weather overlay already uses

Every person gets a profile picture, automatically — whichever registration photo was captured most recently for them (_set_profile_photo() in server.py), no separate upload step. A device-less registration or a flaky camera just means no photo yet, not a missing feature — both frontends fall back to a plain circular placeholder (👤) until one exists. Fetched via GET /people/<id>/photo with a blob

• createObjectURL() on the frontend side, not a bare <img src="..."> — the endpoint is bearer-token gated like everything else here, and a plain <img> tag has no way to send an Authorization header.

Manual verification still outstanding

1. TRUSTED_ENTITY_PREFIXES' defaults are guessed, not confirmed against a real Private BLE Device / Bermuda setup — the single biggest thing to check before trusting registration at all.
2. The worked intent_script/rest_command/custom-sentence YAML above is written against HA's documented shape, not tested against a running HA instance.
3. PRESENT_STATES = {"home"} assumes Private BLE Device's device_tracker entities use the standard home/not_home vocabulary — check yours actually does.
4. The >1 candidate (ambiguous) and already_claimed (conflict) paths are logically covered but never exercised against two real phones in the same room.
5. Multi-device dedup relies on exact-name case-insensitive matching (WHERE name = ? COLLATE NOCASE) — two different people who happen to share a first name would collide into one record. Register with full names if that's a real risk in your household; nothing here disambiguates same-name people.
6. SQLite at /data/identity.db has no backup wiring yet — if ENABLE_BACKUPS is on in setup-container-host.sh, confirm /opt/smart-home/identity is actually covered by whatever paths restic is pointed at (photos under /data/photos too — losing them just loses profile pictures, not the person records themselves, but still worth covering).
7. AREA_ATTRIBUTE's default (area_id) is a guess at what Bermuda actually attaches to a trusted entity's state — unconfirmed, and the whole room field in /presence degrades to null silently if it's wrong, so this could easily go unnoticed until someone builds the actual floor-plan UI and finds it empty.
8. The blob+createObjectURL() profile-picture fetch (all three frontends) has not been checked for a memory leak from never calling URL.revokeObjectURL() on the old blob URL when /people//presence refreshes and re-fetches the same photo — likely fine at household scale and dashboard.js's 60s poll cadence, not measured over a multi-day uptime.
9. DEPARTURE_GRACE_SECONDS' default (15 min) is a guess at how much a real Private BLE Device setup actually flaps — too low and one evening at home becomes several "visits"; too high and a quick trip out doesn't register at all. Nobody has watched a real BLE presence entity over a day to tune it. The visit log's usefulness rests almost entirely on this number, and it's the first thing to check once there's real data in GET /visits.
10. The admin panel has been exercised against the API, not in a browser — every endpoint it calls is covered by the route tests, but the page itself (the <dialog> editor, the prune checkboxes) has not been opened in a real browser on this machine. <dialog>'s showModal() needs a reasonably current browser; the door panel's Chromium is fine, an ancient one wouldn't be.
11. Nothing enforces that voice/TTS consumers actually read speak_name — the field is there and documented, and chores/ uses it, but a future HA intent script that reaches for nickname instead would be wrong in a way this repo can't catch. Worth a look whenever a new consumer of /presence or /resolve gets written.
12. The device-rights HA wiring above is a worked example, not a tested one — same caveat as the voice-registration YAML. The consequence of getting it wrong is worse here than anywhere else in this repo: an automation that calls lock.unlock outside the condition: template guard would open the door regardless of what this service answered. identity cannot enforce that from its side — it only ever answers the question.