The Philips Hue Secure cameras take a strong stance towards keeping their users’ data private while offering an unparalleled feature set and experience. The cornerstone of this approach is End-to-End encryption by default and without compromise.
In this blog post, we’ll highlight the key aspects of this approach, and in the attached white paper, we dive into the technical details and design rationale. By being transparent and inviting scrutiny by experts, we aim to establish strong mutual trust in a solution.
The primary goal of the Hue Secure security design is to protect the video and audio clips and live view stream generated by our cameras so that only the authorized users can access and view them.
Encryption is technology that protects data in a way whereby a key is required to understand and read the data. End-to-end encryption goes further than this by ensuring that this key is only known to the source and recipient of the data, and not by any party in between involved in moving the data (for example, a cloud backend).
With Philips Hue Secure cameras, the full data of every frame is securely encrypted with a key that is only known to the camera and the authorized app. Even stronger, the encryption key never leaves the home and is transferred locally from the App to the camera over Bluetooth and from App to App via a QR code or passphrase. With this, we can assure that Philips Hue never has access to keys and, as a result, the video and audio data.
Going further, the Philips Hue Secure Cameras contain a powerful processor that enables them to do all their video processing and analysis in the camera itself. Features like AI event classification, blackout zones, and activity zones all run locally without the involvement of the cloud backend, unlike many competitor brands. With this, we can enable end-to-end encryption by default and without compromising these advanced features. The cameras are secure and private out of the box.
There are a lot more details to the design to ensure we can make the strongest possible security and privacy guarantees covered in the below white paper for those who want to dive deeper.