Cochlea — Wi-Fi side-channel attack on Ring cameras

I created a terrifying app that probably shouldn't exist, but it needs to exist so people can understand how vulnerable they are when they put consumer-grade cloud-connected surveillance cameras in and around their home. The program's called Cochlea, and it runs on virtually any computer that can run Python. In this demonstration, I'm running it on a little Raspberry Pi with a little USB Wi-Fi adapter that supports monitor mode. Let's say you're using a ring camera as a baby monitor. Every time it detects movement, it'll be capturing video and sending it to the cloud. And then your preference is alerting you. Even if that data is encrypted, it still has a heuristic fingerprint. This means that once that fingerprint is identified, you can see every single time that a particular camera was detecting movement. If you do this throughout a home with a bunch of cloud-connected cameras, you can build a profile of what the people inside are doing and where they're doing it. And this is called a side-channel attack, meaning that nothing is connecting to any wireless networks. This little card is just passively sniffing the Wi-Fi waves in the air. Alright, let's run the program. It asks me to select my wireless interface. It asks me if I want to scan for ring cameras. I do. We found two ring devices in the general vicinity here. One is a doorbell that I think is my neighbor's, and number two is a ring spotlight cam, which I have here in the lab, so we'll choose number two. Now we…