How to use iSight webcam without activating the green light

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Recently a the Dutch government advised to put a tape on your webcam to prevent hackers from taking pictures and video using your device (news article in Dutch).

The build in iSight camera in Apple laptops have a green light next to the camera, this light turns green when you use the camera.

Is it possible to use the camera without the activation of the green light? Personally I think the green light turns on when the sensor requires power and this is hardwired in the hardware. Am I wrong?

I have found similar questions on stackexchange, but I found non that answer this specific question.

Best Answer

"iSeeYou: Disabling the MacBook Webcam Indicator LED" is a paper by Matthew Brocker and Stephen Checkoway from the Johns Hopkins University. In this paper they explain on how to disable the LED when using the camera. In short: normally you use the CPU to access the camera and activate the LED, but you can also use the processing unit in on the camera board itself and this will not activate the green LED. The authors also provide software to protect you against these problems.

iFixit had the same question and their answer was also based on the same paper:

according to the researchers, the vulnerability they discovered affects “Apple internal iSight webcams found in earlier-generation Apple products, including the iMac G5 and early Intel-based iMacs, MacBooks, and MacBook Pros until roughly 2008.” While the attack outlined in the paper is limited to these devices, researchers like Charlie Miller suggest that the attack could be applicable to newer systems as well. “There’s no reason you can’t do it -- it’s just a lot of work and resources but it depends on how well [Apple] secured the hardware,” Miller says.

In short: Yes, the iSight can be used without green light as it is not hardwired.

Example image from the iSeeYou paper

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It's important to know that this script monitors access to the executable...

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreMediaIO.framework/Versions/A/Resources/VDC.plugin/Contents/MacOS/VDC

Full script

-- check if growl is running in order to avoid the "Choose Application" dialog
tell application "System Events"
    set isRunning to (count of (every process whose bundle identifier is "com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp")) > 0
end tell

-- store time of last iSight access
global lastopened
set lastopened to do shell script "ls -lu /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreMediaIO.framework/Versions/A/Resources/VDC.plugin/Contents/MacOS/VDC | awk '{print $6,$7,$8}'"

-- make the application ready for use with growl
if isRunning then
    tell application id "com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp"

        -- make a list of all the notification types that this script will ever send
        set the allNotificationsList to ¬
            {"iSight access monitor"}

        -- register the script with growl
        register as application ¬
            "iSight access monitor" all notifications allNotificationsList ¬
            default notifications allNotificationsList ¬
            icon of application "FaceTime"

        -- send the first notification right after the application is started
        notify with name ¬
            "iSight access monitor" title ¬
            "iSight access monitor" description ¬
            "last iSight access: 
" & lastopened application name "iSight access monitor"
    end tell
end if

-- monitoring routine: checks every 10s if the VDC executable has been accessed
on idle
    tell application id "com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp"
        set newopen to do shell script "ls -lu /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreMediaIO.framework/Versions/A/Resources/VDC.plugin/Contents/MacOS/VDC | awk '{print $6,$7,$8}'"
        if (newopen is not equal to lastopened) then
            notify with name ¬
                "iSight access monitor" title ¬
                "iSight access monitor" description ¬
                "new iSight access: 
" & newopen application name "iSight access monitor"
            set lastopened to newopen
        end if
    end tell
    return 10 -- interval in seconds
end idle

Best Answer

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Full script

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