{"id":8504,"date":"2014-03-02T17:23:40","date_gmt":"2014-03-02T22:23:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=8504"},"modified":"2014-03-02T17:24:25","modified_gmt":"2014-03-02T22:24:25","slug":"isight-spying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2014\/03\/02\/isight-spying\/","title":{"rendered":"iSights Spying on Their Users Without Warning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/blogs\/the-switch\/wp\/2013\/12\/18\/research-shows-how-macbook-webcams-can-spy-on-their-users-without-warning\/\">Ashkan Soltani and Timothy B. Lee<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/blogs\/the-switch\/wp\/2013\/12\/18\/research-shows-how-macbook-webcams-can-spy-on-their-users-without-warning\/\"><p>The built-in cameras on Apple computers were designed to prevent this, says Stephen Checkoway, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins and a co-author of the study. &ldquo;Apple went to some amount of effort to make sure that the LED would turn on whenever the camera was taking images,&rdquo; Checkoway says. The 2008-era Apple products they studied had a &ldquo;hardware interlock&rdquo; between the camera and the light to ensure that the camera couldn&rsquo;t turn on without alerting its owner.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>MacBooks are designed to prevent software running on the MacBook&rsquo;s central processing unit (CPU) from activating its iSight camera without turning on the light. But researchers figured out how to reprogram the chip inside the camera, known as a micro-controller, to defeat this security feature. In a <a href=\"https:\/\/jscholarship.library.jhu.edu\/handle\/1774.2\/36569\">paper<\/a> called &ldquo;iSeeYou: Disabling the MacBook Webcam Indicator LED,&rdquo; Brocker and Checkoway describe how to reprogram the iSight camera&rsquo;s micro-controller to allow the camera and light to be activated independently. That allows the camera to be turned on while the light stays off.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>See also Checkoway&rsquo;s <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/stevecheckoway\/iSightDefender\">iSightDefender<\/a> on GitHub.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ashkan Soltani and Timothy B. Lee: The built-in cameras on Apple computers were designed to prevent this, says Stephen Checkoway, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins and a co-author of the study. &ldquo;Apple went to some amount of effort to make sure that the LED would turn on whenever the camera was taking images,&rdquo; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[152,788,30,74,355,48],"class_list":["post-8504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-camera","tag-isight","tag-mac","tag-opensource","tag-privacy","tag-security"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8504"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8505,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8504\/revisions\/8505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}