A Word About Security And Baby Monitors

Mon, 30 Jan 17

WiFi baby monitors have a clear advantage over standard baby monitors: they have practically unlimited range. Your WiFi monitor will work not only anywhere in your house where you have a WiFi signal, but also from anywhere else – you can check on in your child and their caregiver from work, while you’re travelling, or for peace of mind during a well-earned night out with your spouse. The unlimited range is possible because the audio and video signals are transmitted over the internet. And it is exactly this that leads to questions about security – if I can monitor my baby from anywhere, couldn’t someone with bad intentions do that too? A few well-publicized cases of vulnerabilities in baby monitors, like this one, made lots of parents very nervous.

And rightly so! As parents ourselves, we at Evoz understand that using your baby monitor can’t mean exposing your baby to unnecessary risk. We take security very seriously – for us, it wasn’t an afterthought, but rather something we designed into our Evoz Smart Baby Monitor and our iOS and Android apps from the very beginning.

We aren’t satisfied by broad reassurances, and we don’t expect our customers to be. Here are the specifics on how we keep your data safe:

No default password – First, we do not ship our monitor with a default password. This is a simple precaution, but one that is overlooked by many manufacturers of internet-connected devices. It means that our users are forced to set their own passwords (a simple step, but one that’s easy to skip when you are anxious to get your monitor set up for the first time, and then forget to get back to later!), and our monitors are never accessible to hackers just because they know the default password.

Secure communications – Second, we do not use “universal plug and play” (UPnP) to open a port from the monitor through your home router to the wider internet for remote access. This is a common protocol, but it is known to be susceptible to attack. Instead, both the monitor and the app connect to an Evoz server in the cloud, which checks the credentials of both clients and establishes a secure connection between them.

Password-protected stream even over WiFi – Third, the audio and video stream is password-protected even within your home WiFi network. The monitor’s video stream is only accessible with a username and password that our Evoz app obtains from the Evoz server. A visitor without an Evoz account associated with your specific monitor will not be able to access the video stream – even if they know your home WiFi password or can access other Evoz monitors.

Straightforward user management – Finally, within our app, you can easily give family members or caregivers permission to use the monitor – either as Partner users, who are allowed to access the monitor and baby data at any time and invite other users, or as Guest users, who have limited access and cannot invite other users. Guest user access can be changed or revoked by any Partner user at any time.

If you have questions for us about security (or anything else), you are always welcome to contact us at support@myevoz.com.

Best Regards,

Evoz

RELATED: Sharing Access: How to Safely and Securely Share Baby Monitor Access

Disclosure: This blog post contains contextual affiliate links. Evo Inc. may get commissions for purchases made through links in this post.