Dahua cameras in the US market
I went to buy another Dahua camera and noticed that they are no longer available in the US. Looks like they have tried to skirt around the ban by restructuring but not certain I even want to touch these anymore.
Is there anything I can do to plug up any potential exposure, ie: backdoor vulnerabilities or a way to prevent data from leaving my network?
Not paranoid, just curious as this issue hits many manufacturers and would like to plug any holes (if they can be)
Comments
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I did see an article about turning off unpn and checked my cameras but it was already off.
IP filter would be another option but not certain how I still allow access remotely if I block any exit from my network.
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Two options to prevent unwanted transfer of data between your cameras and the Internet are:
- Set up the cameras with manual IP details, specifying only IP and subnet mask, omitting router and DNS details. Turn off any feature in the camera that relates to making it available from the Internet (like UPnP). This will work for most cameras, but you're still trusting the camera to be well-behaved.
- Put the cameras onto a separate physical or virtual network segment. This is harder to set up, but achieves a proper barrier that cameras can't circumvent. See our blog post Segregating IP Cameras on their own LAN for more information on the physically-segregated method.
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Luminys is the new NDAA compliant version of Dahua cameras that are available in the US.
Sadly, the most current version of SS does not include a driver for Luminys cameras.
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While it's correct that there is currently no Luminys-specific profile in SecuritySpy, Luminys cameras all seem to be ONVIF-compliant, and as such should all work in SecuritySpy using the existing ONVIF profile.
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I don't currently have anything set up to access my network remotely... is this still a concern for me?
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Hi @nealk the main privacy worry is that cameras will attempt to make outgoing connections to Internet servers to "phone home" and transfer data. It's not easy to tell what this data is - probably things like usage stats for business intelligence purposes - but some users worry about this enough to block cameras from the ability to make outgoing connections.
We've also seen cameras that attempt to set up incoming access to themselves from the Internet (by automatically configuring the router using the UPnP protocol). This isn't sinister - it's likely just an attempt to make access to the camera easier for users - but it does introduce a potential security hole in your network. This is more rare, and I don't think Dahua cameras do this by default. For cameras that do this, this is usually a settings option that is on by default and you can turn off.
The above two items can be concerns, whether you have set up remote access to your system or not.
