Xiaomi Mijia cameras discovered to have major security issue

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The Xiaomi Mijia was found to have a very critical security problem recently. For some reason, Xiaomi's security cameras are able to capture still images from other cameras' feeds. Google was made aware of this issue soon enough and Xiaomi is hopefully already in the midst of resolving it.

According to Android Police, the problem was first reported on Reddit. A Redditor that goes by the alias Dio-V posted about how he was getting still images from the camera feeds of others when he tried to access the video feed for his Mijia security cameras via voice command. This is rather alarming because if Dio-V could do it, so could others. Using the same method, random strangers would be able to spy on others due to the security flaw.

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Image from Dio-V, which shows stills from someone else's camera

Whether the cause stems from the Mi Home service, a problematic firmware, or a hardware defect on the camera was not confirmed. However, Google is playing it safe and has already disabled the Mi Home's integration with Google Home and Assistant to prevent abuse. As of now, all Xiaomi Mijia should no longer be connected to the two Google services.

Do you own a Xiaomi Mijia security camera and have encountered this problem before? Let us know on our Facebook page if you have. Also, stay tuned to TechNave.com for updates on this news.

Update: Xiaomi has forwarded an official statement to us, which you can read below.

We are aware there was an issue of receiving stills while connecting Mi Home Security Camera Basic 1080p on Google Home hub. We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused to our users.

Our team has since acted immediately to solve the issue and it is now fixed. Upon investigation, we have found out the issue was caused by a cache update on December 26, 2019, which was designed to improve camera streaming quality. This has only happened in extremely rare conditions. In this case, it happened during the integration between Mi Home Security Camera Basic 1080p and the Google Home Hub with a display screen under poor network conditions.

We have also found 1044 users were with such integrations and only a few with extremely poor network conditions might be affected. This issue will not happen if the camera is linked to the Xiaomi's Mi Home app.

Xiaomi has communicated and fixed this issue with Google, and has also suspended this service until the root cause has been completely solved, to ensure that such issues will not happen again.