Amazon Introduces End-To-End Encryption To Protect Its Ring Doorbell Users’ Privacy, New Features Included In The E2EE – Know More Here
Amazon the mass provider of a variety of products commonly focuses on e-commerce, entertainment, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence.
The Ring doorbell which is a product developed and sold by Amazon is a smart home device with outdoor motion detection cameras and has a video doorbell.
It has been manufactured since 2014 and people have been using it since then. But did you know that videos and audio captured by them were not private, anybody could access them. If you are thinking about getting the Ring Protect Plan, it’s not worth it because here your videos would be safe and stored in Amazon’s Web Services Cloud but a hacker or even your local police station could access it and know who’s passing by your street by a simple code.
You might be wondering how you can protect your privacy. Well, you don’t need to worry. Amazon recently announced that it will work on encrypting the Ring doorbells after certain privacy advocates wanted Amazon to look after their users’ privacy and security issues. This feature will first roll out in the US and then will be made available to other countries as well.
The system Amazon will be using is the Amazon End-to-End Encryption (E2EE).To install this new privacy feature you first need to install a new Ring application, that has been launched by Amazon, on your phone. This privacy feature will include the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) security system. This system works towards protecting your data by unique digital identities for users, devices, and applications and secure end-to-end communications. This feature uses an RSA 2048-bit asymmetric account signing key pair.
Talking about the RSA asymmetric account it includes an asymmetric code that will help encrypt public data and this data will be protected by the key pair the RSA asymmetric account is signed into. This key pair has two keys: a public key and a private key where the public key encrypts the data but the private key can only decrypt the data which is quite secure and cannot be known. It is quite a powerful security system so you do not need to worry.
The Ring devices in the past installed an update in which the videos could be encrypted by uploading them to the cloud where they were safe in the Ring servers. But these videos could not be easily accessed by Law Enforcement. It was your choice whether you wanted them to see those videos or not.
With the Amazon End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) your data will be double secure where you will be provided with a lock system and you can watch the video from your security vault by the lock provided to you. This lock will consist of a key that will only be stored in the user’s device and can be accessed by the user only.
When you install the new Ring application you will need to activate the E2EE security system as it will not turn on automatically after you install the application. This device will also require you to set a passphrase – a string of words that must be used to gain access to a computer system or service (Wikipedia). This passphrase needs to be remembered as Amazon Web Services will not store your passphrase for privacy reasons. If you forget it it will be your loss.
Also, both the Ring app and the E2EE have not been completely amalgamated so there are certain features of the earlier Ring app that you will not see in the E2EE like the ability to view encrypted videos and audio on Ring.com, or on your Windows laptop, Macbook, etc.
