Investigating Security and Privacy of a Cloud-Based Wireless IP Camera: NetCam

Abstract

Over the last few years, there has been a significant increase in the number of IP cameras used in various places including markets, malls, pharmacies, movie theatres and schools. Recent products on the market are cloud-based and upload the captured video to a cloud server. With widespread use, security of these IP cameras emerges as an important issue. However, there is still very little work done on the security of these devices. In this paper, we investigate security of cloud-based wireless IP cameras. Security of these devices spans multiple research areas including secure multimedia, network security and cloud security. We have investigated the traffic generated by a low-end, easy-to-setup, off-the-shelf wireless IP camera for average home user. We explored the security precautions taken by the manufacturers of IP cameras and evaluated the access control mechanisms in place. We used a variety of open source and non-commercial tools in our investigation. We identified many security and privacy issues in using these devices ranging from minor to severe issues.We showed that if a malicious person can sniff the IP camera's network traffic anywhere in between the mobile device-cloud servers-IP camera path, he would be able to reconstruct the JPEG images, which is a serious a privacy issue.