Reverse Engineering a Cheap Indoor Camera: Exploiting Tapo's Security Flaws

The author bought a cheap Tapo indoor camera to monitor their dog, but this led to an unexpected journey of reverse engineering. To bypass the cumbersome setup process and forced subscription of the Tapo app, the author decompiled the APK, performed a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, and wrote cryptographic scripts. This revealed a critical vulnerability: a default password "TPL075526460603". A bash script was created for cloudless onboarding. The process uncovered security flaws in Tapo's firmware, such as inconsistent use of SHA-256 and MD5 encryption and a haphazard password synchronization mechanism. The author successfully configured the camera, only to discover their dog mostly slept.