I guess what I’m asking is if garage remotes are secure.
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Older garage door openers, which are still in common use, use a fixed code. These are very easy to capture and replay, because they don’t change. Worse than that, there are only a relatively small number of combinations, and it’s easy to just play through all of the combinations in just a few minutes without needing to capture anything.
Modern garage door openers are a little smarter. Instead of using a fixed code, they use a code that changes every time you push the button (“rolling codes”). Even if you capture many codes, you can’t easily predict what the next code is. But if you are able to interfere with the garage door’s ability to hear the code, you can capture and replay the unheard code and the garage door will accept it.
This is challenging to do in practice, since if you’re capturing and jamming someone pushing their button, they’re expecting their door to open, so you have to potentially capture more than one code as they sit there frustrated, and replay the first code in order to get the door to open so that they won’t be suspicious. This will leave you with one of the later codes that you can replay later.
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