Over on YouTube [Matt Brown] hacks a Chinese security camera recently banned by the US government. If you didn’t hear about this you can find out more over here: Major US online retailers remove listings for millions of prohibited Chinese electronics.

After powering the camera with a power-over-Ethernet (PoE) adapter [Matt] sets about monitoring network activity with Wireshark. The first data comes from DNS for the host devaccess.easy4ipclound.com, which whois reports is operated by Alibaba Cloud LLC in California. This is a Chinese owned company with servers in the United States.

[Matt] covers some basics of TLS and how it works. He then goes on to explain how a Man in the Middle (MITM) attack works at a high level. To setup a MITM attack against the camera [Matt] sets up some port redirections using iptables for ports 443, 15301, 8683, 9898, and 12337 which his Wireshark analysis indicates were being used. His MITM attack works, which means the device is not properly verifying its certificate signing chain.

[Matt] goes on to reverse engineer the custom UDP protocol used for transmitting video data. He uses a vibe-coded Python program along with ffmpeg for that and manages to reconstruct a few frames of video taken from the UDP packet capture.

We think it would be safe to say that [Matt] did indeed find a few security problems with the camera as-is, but we don’t think that’s the point of the ban. The real problem is that there is auto-update facilities for the device firmware which means that in future malicious software could be uploaded by the manufacturer in the form of a firmware update. So even if this device was secure against MITM attacks and didn’t send unencrypted video data over UDP you would still have the problem of the firmeware update if there is no trust.