Why is this camera reporting to China?

Have you tried refreshing the router page that’s showing the WYZE device? Sometimes it will still have the last set of up/Mac data for connected clients unless you refresh the page. It’s a quirk in the internal web server in a chip that may not auto-refresh when there’s a dataset change. If is still in conflict, re-boot the cam and then the router page.

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Like the hair

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Agreed. We are working on it.

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Interesting. Are you a pro or a motivated amateur? :slight_smile:

Did try refreshing the router page but no joy. Had to hard reboot the cam.

孤独的电话回家

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Thanks for claifying. I had an unknown mac adress with Nova Electronics next to it in my network. Never knew the Wyze could be responsible for two mac adress sightings in my network.

“This is the C8028F MACs that you are looking. The firmware takes over and then change to the WYZE MAC (4ADA22).”

MAC addresses are hard coded (that’s a fact) if the MAC changes , that’s called spoofing.
So please explain.

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Correct. It is MAC spoofing, but in this case it is done legitimately to identify the device as a Wyze product. This is done more commonly than you might think. It saves on manufacturing costs when several companies are using the same hardware, but need the device to be identified with their company. So, the MAC address change is done at the firmware level…as I said, legitimately.

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The more important consideration here is what MAC spoofing means vs. sending data to another country. The MAC identifies your hardware in your local network. The original post and images show the local MAC and local private IP Address. Those are just that “local” and do not indicate anything outbound to the Internet. I’m not saying these cams don’t send anything to China as I haven’t looked into that yet. It is just that the evidence originally posted gave no indication at all of any data going to China, only that a chipset in the device is made there.

Did you read what you wrote before posting ?

Please enlighten me to the “legitimate” reasons for spoofing ?

MAC spoofing - Wikipedia To prevent third parties from using the MAC address to track devices, Android, Linux, iOS, and Windows have implemented MAC address randomization. In June 2014, Apple announced that future versions of their iOS platform would randomize MAC addresses for all WiFi connections. The [Linux kernel] has supported MAC address randomization during network scans since March 2015 but drivers need to be updated to use this feature.[[8]] Windows has supported it since the release of [Windows 10] in July 2015.

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I’m pretty sure no matter what I, or anyone else writes in this thread is going to convince you there is no wrong-doing going on with how Wyze has implemented their software and firmware to behave in regards to the MAC address. Several of us have explained to you why we don’t believe it’s an issue. It’s actually okay if you don’t believe us, because every one of us has a certain level of risk we are willing to accept. You have the option to either use the cameras, or not. I truly hope you find the answer you’re looking for. :slight_smile:

Because MAC spoofing is so trivially easy on practically any piece of networking hardware, you shouldn’t set up your security to depend on MAC addresses. I bet Nova Electronics Shanghai is shipping out multiple devices with identical MACs in the C8028F range - these might go to a number of different companies. When Wyze buys these, they program them to switch over to their own unique MAC addresses.

Is there a specific security concern that you’d like us to address here? What vulnerabilities are you worried about?

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Personally can care far less what other people(including gasp China) sees. If that’ even the truth. Google does far more spying on my buyin/viewing/brwosing habits than Wyze will ever figure out how to.

Anyhoos, My dog says: “Hi China! Woof Woof”

Hello,

Ticket # 233033

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I’d bet this is a firmware problem of some kind- the camera can’t load the MAC from the Wyze firmware, so it’s defaulting back to the one hard-coded into the WiFi chip.

No idea - but the camera Wyze MAC is also connected to my network at the same time and the camera is working fine.

I’m guessing “camera reboots for whatever reason, WiFi chip says ‘Hey, is anyone out there? Can I get an IP address, please?’ at the default MAC address once or twice during the boot process before Wyze firmware overwrites MAC address.” So you’ll see the default address for the WiFi chip in your ARP table, because your router heard it talking very briefly at that MAC.

If it ends up being something else, please let me know!

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The wifi chip doesn’t connect to my network every time I boot the camera. However when it does join, it remains connected to my network as long as the camera remains powered.

If/when support tells me what the issue is I will post it here.

Amazon has data centers around the globe to provide duplicate data when other data centers are being upgraded or serviced. Perhaps this switching of MAC addresses happens when the AWS server your data is being stored on switches to a duplicate server to provide uninterrupted service. It’s safe to assume that over 70% of the Internet runs on Amazon in some form or capacity. Just because your devices hit nodes in China doesn’t necessarily mean malicious activity is taking place.