1779: "The Encryption Keys Inside the Camera"

0:00Somebody stole a flock camera from above a roadway and examined what was stored inside. They found a way to unlock thousands of recordings that were supposed to be protected. Flot cameras photographed passing vehicles and send information to searchable computer systems where license plates could be read. They're used by police departments and other organizations. Flot safety has maintained that encryption would protect the recordings even if somebody stole a camera. But hackers, they found an encryption key stored on the device itself. Encryption uses mathematics to scramble information so it can't be read without the correct digital key. A key is essentially a very long, carefully generated string of numbers. Modern encryption is very difficult to crack, even with powerful computers. These hackers, they didn't have to crack it. They recovered the key that was needed to decrypt some of the recordings. The weakness was in how the key was stored, not a demonstrated failure of the encryption algorithm.

1:06The camera's activity logs covered about 21 days and recorded roughly 50,200 vehicle detections. The recovered data included approximately 1.6 million images, more than 27,000 short video clips. Researchers also examined the camera's artificial intelligence, which identified vehicles, people, and license plate-like shapes before sending selected information to Flot's computers. The camera handled some processing itself, a method known as edge computing. The software occasionally made mistakes, including identifying American flag patches as license plate-like shapes. Researchers found no evidence the facial recognition was actively operating though. Flot said it needed more information to evaluate these findings. Some sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible. The researchers demonstrated that someone with physical access to this camera could recover protective recordings, but they didn't demonstrate a remote attack against the entire network.

2:16The hackers didn't need a supercomputer or mathematical breakthrough. They literally found the key inside the camera. These are interesting things with JC.