Ring Video Doorbell Pro Under the Scope

This article – part of a series developed in partnership with PCMag – aims to shed some light about the security of world’s best-sellers in the IoT space. PCMag contacted the research team at Bitdefender and asked us to have a look at several popular devices, including the Ring Video Doorbell Pro. More info about this project is available here.

Bitdefender researchers have discovered an issue in Amazon’s Ring Video Doorbell Pro IoT device that allows an attacker physically near the device to intercept the owner’s Wi-Fi network credentials and possibly mount a larger attack against the household network.

Vulnerability at a glance

When entering configuration mode, the device receives the user’s network credentials from the smartphone app. Data exchange is performed through plain HTTP, which means that the credentials are exposed to any nearby eavesdroppers.

Another important step in exploitation is the fact that a hostile actor can trigger the reconfiguration of the Ring Video Doorbell Pro. One way to do this is to continuously send deauthentication messages, so that the device gets dropped from the wireless network. At this point, the mobile app loses connectivity and instructs the user to reconfigure the device.

Automatic update already delivered

At the moment of publishing this paper, all Ring Doorbell Pro cameras have received a security update that fixes the issue described herein.

More information is available in the technical whitepaper below:

Download the whitepaper