Capturing real-time video through walls isn’t hard if you have an antenna and a little bit of engineering know-how. It could be a massive threat to billions of security and phone cameras.
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When it comes to protecting a bank or even your home, security cameras are on one of the first lines of defense. But what if those cameras aren’t as secure as we all think?
New research from Northeastern University confirms that there might be a massive gap in our security infrastructure –– and it comes from the very devices designed to protect it.
Kevin Fu, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern who specializes in cybersecurity, has figured out a way to eavesdrop on most modern cameras, from home security cameras and dash cams to the camera on your phone. Called EM Eye, short for Electromagnetic Eye, the technique can capture the video from another person’s camera through walls in real time. It redefines the idea of a Peeping Tom.
According to Fu, anyone with a few hundred dollars of equipment, a radio antenna and a little bit of engineering know-how could do this. The problem, Fu says, is not the lens but the wires inside most modern cameras.
“With your typical security camera, on the inside there’s a camera lens and then there’s got to be something else on the inside, like a computer chip, that’s got a wireless connection back to the internet,” Fu says. “There are wires between two different chips inside [these cameras,] and those wires give off electromagnetic radiation. We pick up that radio, and then we decode it and it just happens to be that we get the real-time encoded video.”
The data transmission cable that sends a video as bits and bytes ends up unintentionally acting as a radio antenna that leaks all kinds of electromagnetic information, including those bits and bytes. If someone had the desire and the technical knowledge, they could take that electromagnetic signal and reproduce the real-time video, without audio.
