Holiday Hangover Hardware Hacking
Circuit Cellar|January 2025
Having too much cheer during the holidays? In this month's article, Colin offers a diversion from the jolly season by urging developers to retreat to the basement to brush up on hardware hacking skills. He shows how a low-cost Raspberry Pi Pico and a TP-Link Tapo C200 smart IP camera could become the next automated bird deterrent or a home automation server.
Colin O'Flynn
Holiday Hangover Hardware Hacking

Using a Raspberry Pi Pico to Hack an IP Camera

The holidays are a great time to pick up some lowcost IoT hardware for practicing or developing your hardware-hacking skills. In this article, I'll go over some work on the TP-Link Tapo C200 smart Internet Protocol (IP) camera. I use this camera as the basis for several labs in my undergraduate course on cybersecurity at Dalhousie University.

It's also a heavily attacked device. You'll find several nice websites and repositories that have similar work. In particular, I first used the work by DrmnSamoLiu on GitHub [1], but several other resources are also available [2]. Despite all the attacks, there is still lots of analysis left! One alluring feature of this camera is its very low cost-it often appears in sales, reducing the cost further. And it features some interesting hardware, including a camera with pan-tilt capability, a microphone, and a speaker. It also runs Linux with Wi-Fi connectivity, so if you could run your own software on this device, you could turn it into anything from an automated bird deterrent to a local, miniature, home automation server.

To make this as accessible as possible, I'll use the Raspberry Pi Pico as the actual hardware-hacking tool. Onto this board we'll load several different firmware images to give us the various interfaces we need to work with the Tapo C200.

FIRST LOOKS

When looking at a device to analyze, one cheat is to use the FCC-ID that any wireless device is required to have. Looking up the FCC-ID of this device (2AXJ4C200V2) [3] will give you internal photos of the main board. I often use this to check if the device appears to have some internal headers that might make attacking it easier, before even buying it.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة January 2025 من Circuit Cellar.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة January 2025 من Circuit Cellar.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

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