Cameras and Doorbells

Smart Home Threat Taxonomy › Cameras and Doorbells (OPH-CM)

Indoor and outdoor cameras, video doorbells, recorders and their clips put the inside of the house, and the people in it, on the network. Every flaw is a window into a private space.

Where it sits in the house

The Cameras and Doorbells suit sits at the front door and inside the rooms, looking at the people who live there. It is suit 4 of 13, in the Things deck.

Cameras and Doorbells highlighted on the Open House cross-section

The table

Smart Home Threat Taxonomy, Cameras and Doorbells: ID, threat, mitigation principle and design measures for all 13 entries

Mappings

Cameras and Doorbells: STRIDE, CAPEC 3.9 and CWE 5.0 mappings for each entry, with physical-safety flags

Entries in text

  • OPH-CM-A Someone Else’s Feed. A cloud, cache or relay fault serves one household’s live view, events or thumbnails to another household’s app.
  • OPH-CM-K Default Login on the Recorder. Cameras and recorders ship with default or weak credentials, or hidden support accounts, and are reachable from the internet through P2P services or port mappings.
  • OPH-CM-Q Stranger in the Camera. Camera accounts protected by a password alone are taken over by credential stuffing, and the attacker watches and talks to the household through the camera.
  • OPH-CM-J Local Only That Isn’t. The product says video stays local or is end-to-end encrypted, but thumbnails, clips or face data still go to the cloud, unencrypted or viewable by URL.
  • OPH-CM-10 Insider Watches the Feed. Vendor staff, contractors or support agents can view customer video, or an installer adds their own account to a customer system.
  • OPH-CM-9 Device ID Is the Password. A vendor P2P SDK treats the device’s UID as enough to connect, so anyone who learns a UID can impersonate the device or intercept its stream.
  • OPH-CM-8 Stream Open on the LAN. RTSP and ONVIF streams answer on the home network without authentication or encryption, so any compromised device on the Wi-Fi can watch.
  • OPH-CM-7 Recording Without the Light. The camera can stream or record with its indicator light off, under software control, so people in the room cannot tell they are being watched.
  • OPH-CM-6 Footage Shared Beyond the Owner. Clips are shared through neighbourhood apps, police portals or links that never expire and can be guessed, and the owner cannot see who has them.
  • OPH-CM-5 Camera Sees the Neighbours. Doorbells and outdoor cameras record the street, the neighbours’ gardens and conversations by default, putting the household in breach of privacy law.
  • OPH-CM-4 Doorbell Off the Wall. A video doorbell comes off the wall with a standard screwdriver, and its flash holds the home Wi-Fi password and account tokens in plain text.
  • OPH-CM-3 Alerts Until They’re Off. An attacker trips the motion alerts again and again, until the owner mutes them or turns the camera off, and then comes back.
  • OPH-CM-2 Clips Kept Forever. Clips and event history are kept with no limit, so years of comings and goings, children and visitors sit in the account for anyone who gets into it.

† marks a physical-safety consequence. The full principle, measures and mappings for each entry are in the tables above and in the downloads.

Seen in the wild

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Smart Home Threat Taxonomy v1.0 · © 2026 Jonathan Brett Crawley · Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 with additional permissions.