Re:Alternative open firmware for your IP camera
by squarefoot on Sunday October 08, 2023 @05:24PM
(#37814556)
When in doubt, I take for granted that every camera with closed firmware contains malware that phones home or waits dormant to be used to steal sensitive video+audio or to take part in a botnet, which already happened several times. The solution as of today is to put a firewall in between that blocks any traffic to the LAN and from the outside, except from trusted applications.
There are many multi ETH port mini PCs that can be repurposed as firewalls so that the video surveillance subnet can be physically separated from the rest by connecting all cameras (for obvious reasons I wouldn't take WiFi into consideration) to a switch, possibly with PoE support.
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Re:Alternative open firmware for your IP camera
by matisseverduyn on Sunday October 08, 2023 @06:35PM
(#37815036)
I bought a box of these in 2019 (6 for ~$7 each), and connected them all to an offline router.
They come with a web interface for setup/control that uses JS (easy to reverse engineer [@]) to interact with the device's API (not as easy to figure out).
-- also stripped the wifi, mic, and speakers, and put the chip+camera in a new casing (waterproof outdoor outlet cover) --
I then bought a few more from various sources (different colors / casings) and, even though they all had slightly different web interfaces, under the hood, they were all running roughly the same code under the hood (MIPCM). Some didn't come with a web interface, but still responded to the same requests.
[@] If you're/anyone's interested in the camera API wrapper-code, happy to send it via Twitter.