Get the latest tech news

Reverse-Engineering an IP Camera (2019)

pilogue A few days ago I had to replace the old IP camera I use to watch over my dogs and cats, and found out that IP cam technology changed a lot since I bought that old camera. IP cameras are now low-price and ubiquitous.

However, that presented a good opportunity for reverse engineering a third party hardware, and maybe I could even get into the guts of the camera and change the things I didn't like in it. Since the camera takes my WiFi password to send video and audio from my home to an external server, I believe I should understand exactly what if being done with this data. I would expect a good data compression here, since we're transmitting video to the other side of the world, but this protocol doesn't seem to be very efficient in terms of saving network traffic:

Get the Android app