Update Firmware on Ring Video Doorbell Pro

I accept a dear/hate relationship with my Band Doorbell.  When I purchased it in 2016 it worked great for a year with minimal issues.  As it became more than popular, I noticed the quality dropped with video freezes, black videos, and missed motility events.  This led me to the
Ring Doorbell subreddit where I found a community of users who were also experiencing the aforementioned bug.  This made me feel a bit meliorate (misery loves visitor, right?) but yet disappointed that this $250 doorbell no longer lived up to its promise.

A number of the users who shared their negative feedback traced some of the poor service to firmware changes.  It soon became commonplace to postal service your bug along with the firmware version your device was currently running.  Pretty basic troubleshooting practice.  And then information technology was much to everyone’s dismay when in late 2017,
Ring decided to change how they displayed firmware versions.  In brusque, if your device is on the latest version the mobile app would only display, “Up to Date” every bit opposed to an bodily firmware version number.  Only without an actual firmware version number to compare with others, for all you know your device may actually be on an older version but hasn’t properly updated itself such that it merely *thinks* it is up to engagement.  Presumably, if it was actually out of date, it will display a version number, but this is useless as you cannot manually force an upgrade.  And again, you can’t compare with others to know which version you should actually be on.  This besides makes it difficult to track changes that Ring is making and correlate them to your device’s functioning improvements or degradations.  As y’all might imagine, in that location was
a lively Reddit give-and-take on this.

Being in the data security field, I know that software version numbers are disquisitional to confirming that my application is fully patched confronting any identified security vulnerabilities.  Naturally, I was disappointed past this change and soon looked for means to determine the version number using, what else?  My Palo Alto firewall.

I knew my Ring Doorbell had to communicate with Ring’s servers in some way to bank check if it was running the latest firmware version.  I figured an easy way for Ring to practice this is via user agent strings.  And then I first checked the
Monitor tab to see if the user agent of the device appeared in the
URL Filtering view.  Sadly, the user agent field was blank suggesting that it wasn’t normal http traffic that this data was in.  Nevertheless feeling confident that the user agent must be somewhere, I decided to run a bundle capture through the Palo Alto via
Monitor -> Packet Capture.

1. Navigate to
   Configure Filtering -> Manage Filters.
2. Click
   Add
   and configure the
   Source
   with the IP address of your Ring Doorbell.  I have mine statically assigned via my DHCP server but this should be fairly easy for you to determine either in your wireless router or your Palo Alto firewall.  Click
   OK
   when done.

3. Back in the
Configure Filtering
menu turnFilteringto
ON.

four. InConfigure Capturing
clickAdd
and selectfirewall
for
Stage
and give your parcel capture a file name. In this instance I’ve usedringdoorbell.  ClickOK
and your view should await like the one below.

v. In one case you’re set up, in the same view setPacket CapturetoON.  Y’all’ll receive a warning near bundle captures degrading system performance and to remember to disable the feature once yous’re washed.  Click
OK
to proceed.

6. Now we need to generate some traffic through the doorbell to hopefully observe the user agent string in the bundle captures.  Get-go aLive View
session through your Ring mobile app and let it run for at least xxx seconds.  Once completed, setPacket Captureback toOFF.

7. Click theRefreshbutton in the superlative right corner or reload the page to find your newly created packet capture file in theCaptured Files
view.  Click on it to download the file to your computer.

8. You’ve got a few options to view this file.  Since I’1000 on a MacBook Pro, I’ll walk through how to use tcpdump to quickly find the user amanuensis.  You could as well use Wireshark to accomplish this.

Locate the file on your system and use the following tcpdump command:tcpdump -nn -r ringdoorbell.pcap -A | grep -i amanuensis

        tcpdump -nn -r ringdoorbell.pcap -A | grep -i agent reading from file ringdoorbell.pcap, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet) User-Agent: Device/lpdv2/1.13.00069 User-Agent: Device/lpdv2/1.13.00069 User-Agent: Device/lpdv2/1.13.00069 User-Agent: Device/lpdv2/ane.13.00069
        
      

Voila!  You can see that my user agent shows that my Ring is on firmware version 1.13.00069.  From here, I could look for means to automate this or periodically run this check manually and compare with previous captures to see if I can correlate Band issues with changing firmware numbers.  Another style to possibly practice this is to utilise my favorite security tool
Bro
to excerpt this automatically in real time.

I hope that Ring strongly reconsiders this modify and reverts back to displaying the full firmware version number.  But in the meantime, I (and now you!) have a way to accurately determine this value.

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