Smart doorbell company, Ring is trialling video end-to-end encryption to improve the security of its customer’s home video feeds.
The feature is currently being rolled out as a pilot to gain feedback from customers. If successful, customers will need to opt-in to get the new end-to-end video encryption security feature.
Providing an extra layer of security, end-to-end encryption is designed to protect data from being accessed by anyone other than the intended recipient.
While Ring has ensured that videos are already encrypted when footage is uploaded to the cloud as well as when footage is stored on Ring servers, it says that the new feature will add encryption at home level, which can only be recovered using a key stored locally on user mobile devices.
A spokesperson from the Amazon-owned company said: “The feature has been designed so that only the customer can decrypt and view recordings on their enrolled device.”
Users who are part of this rollout scheme can enable the feature from the Video Encryption page in the Ring app’s control centre.
Martin Jartelius, CSO of Outpost24 thinks that it’s very important that companies such as Ring are taking security seriously.
“When we researched Ring equipment when they hit the market, they carried all the hallmarks of IoT technology rushed to market, including undocumented possibilities to extract the Wi-Fi passwords from the devices and a range of other risks privately disclosed to Ring at the time. It is good to see that those issues are long gone, and that the vendor is pushing forwards to increase the control over information it offers to its users.
“It should be noted however that adding encryption for the feeds as such rely entirely on the vendor, which is already what is safeguarding the information today – the initiative is good, but the primary risk, the vendor or an entity accessing information via the vendor, still remain. Completely regardless of this, it’s still great to see something that had potential, but also substantial challenges rise to take a very serious positioning in regards to security.”