A garage cover is being exposed to Alexa from HA, but Alexa will open the cover without asking for a PIN, which is a security issue. I don’t know if this is an Alex problem or a problem how HA is exposing the cover.
I was using the MyQ integration (back when it was still working). Alexa recognized it as a security device and required a PIN every time Alexa was asked to open the garage.
I moved over to Ratgdo for local control of the garage doors via ESPHome.
Now, Alexa does show the garage device exposed by HA, and it DOES provide the “Open by Voice” option (see image), but it does NOT ask for the PIN.
I’m not sure if this is a HA/cloud issue (how the device is exposed & discovered) or an Alexa issue. I posted a question about this on the Amazon Forum, but have not heard anything.
Below you can see that the cover was exposed to Alexa as a “Garage door” type. And, more importantly, that Alexa is requiring “Open by Voice” which I have enabled and set a PIN for. But speaking “Alexa, open the single garage door” works without Alexa asking for the PIN.
The security issues, of course, is anyone can open the garage by asking Alexa. (And I’ve tried with multiple different people – so it’s not bypassing by knowing my voice.)
Seeing how Alexa asked for a PIN with the exposed MyQ integration and not with the new Ratgdo cover, I created my own “fake” cover in configuration.yaml and exposed it to Alexa. The Alexa app does recognize it is a cover and offers the “Open by Voice” but Alexa does not ask for the PIN. In other words, it doesn’t seem to be specific to the Ratdgo/ESPHome integration.
The “fake” cover works both in HA and I can ask Alexa to “open the fake garage door” and it will “open” it in HA.
I’m happy to post the YAML for setting up the fake garage, if that helps.
But my main question is if this is an issue in HA or Alexa.