Ring's TAKE Encryption: Throwing Away the Key to Limit Cloud Access to Your Videos
Ring has built a new encryption method called TAKE — short for Throw Away the Key Encryption — that restricts when and why Amazon's cloud can access user video, without relying on traditional end-to-end encryption. TAKE began rolling out gradually in September 2026 and will become the default encryption for all Ring customers worldwide, regardless of whether they pay for a subscription. Amazon's corporate site confirms the global default rollout. Amazon
The system is built on Messaging Layer Security (MLS), an open standard from the IETF, the body that defines many of the internet's core protocols. TAKE generates unique encryption keys for Ring footage that rotate every five minutes of video. Ring keeps copies of these keys so it can decrypt footage for cloud-based features like smart alerts, AI-powered video search, and video descriptions — but it permanently deletes each key copy within 24 hours and keeps no backups. The Verge
Ring's copies of the TAKE keys live inside an AWS Nitro Enclave, a hardware-isolated computing environment where Ring's own access is restricted by access controls, cryptography, and the physical separation of the enclave from the rest of the system. Ring says there is no persistent storage of TAKE keys and no way for a Ring employee to access them. The keys can only be unlocked by the enclave when it proves, through a process called cryptographic attestation, that it is running the exact software image Ring approved. To view older footage, an authorized device running the Ring app must push the relevant keys to Ring for that specific session. Amazon's servers cannot force devices to hand over keys remotely. The Verge
TAKE draws on the privacy ideas behind end-to-end encryption (E2EE), which Ring also offers on some cameras. With E2EE, only the user holds the keys — Ring never sees them — and the user protects footage with a passphrase they create. Ring says it was the first major smart home security provider to offer video E2EE, which became available in August 2026. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has noted that Ring's E2EE lets users decide when and whether to share footage in a way that Amazon or Ring cannot easily circumvent. The Verge
The practical difference between the two modes comes down to cloud features. With E2EE, Ring never holds the keys and cannot run any server-side processing on the video — no smart alerts, no AI search. TAKE is designed to preserve those features while still limiting how long the cloud can decrypt footage. Both modes are available on newer Ring cameras that encrypt video on the device itself, and customers can switch between them. Older cameras that encrypt only when video reaches the cloud support TAKE but not E2EE. The Verge
Ring spokesperson Sam McGee said that under TAKE, Ring will only be able to hand over non-video information and encrypted video files in response to law enforcement requests. After the 24-hour processing window, the keys needed to decrypt historical footage are gone from Ring's systems, so the raw video is effectively inaccessible to Ring and, by extension, to anyone serving legal process on Ring. The Verge
The broader context here is the tension between what users expect from privacy and what cloud-based AI features actually require. True end-to-end encryption is straightforward in principle: if the server cannot read the video, the server cannot run AI models against it. TAKE tries to occupy the middle ground by giving the cloud a narrow, time-limited window to decrypt footage inside a hardware-isolated environment, while ensuring that older footage becomes cryptographically inaccessible to Ring itself.
Worth flagging is the reliance on that 24-hour deletion window. TAKE's security against law enforcement demands, insider threats, or subpoenas depends on whether Ring has already purged the relevant keys. If footage is requested within the 24-hour window, the keys still exist, though locked behind Nitro Enclave attestation. What the design does is shift the trust boundary from policy — Ring promising not to look — to hardware and cryptography, meaning Ring is technically unable to look after deletion. That is a meaningful shift for a consumer IoT platform that has faced scrutiny over its data-sharing relationships with law enforcement.
In my view, the choice of MLS is worth noting. MLS was designed for efficient group key agreement in asynchronous messaging — think of how a group chat app keeps everyone's keys in sync as people join and leave. Applying it to a rotating-key video encryption pipeline is a creative adaptation rather than a textbook use of the standard. The five-minute key rotation means that even within the 24-hour processing window, compromise of any single key exposes at most five minutes of footage. That limits the damage in a way that a single static key cannot.
The push-only key delivery mechanism also matters. Because Amazon's servers cannot pull keys from authorized devices, a subpoena to Ring for historical footage older than 24 hours would produce only encrypted files that no one can read. The practical effect is that access to older video would require compromising the user's own device or getting the user to cooperate — not serving legal process to Amazon. That shifts control toward the device owner.
For the device fleet, the split between on-device encryption (newer cameras supporting both TAKE and E2EE) and cloud-ingress encryption (older cameras supporting only TAKE) means the security posture depends on hardware generation. Customers with older cameras cannot opt into full E2EE, but they do benefit from the enclave-backed key management and automatic deletion that TAKE provides.
Over the long arc, what this enables is a middle path for consumer IoT: cloud-powered intelligence without indefinite plaintext retention. The model is portable — any platform that needs server-side AI processing on sensitive data could adopt a similar short-lived-key, enclave-backed architecture. The tradeoffs are real, and the 24-hour window is a processing and legal vulnerability by definition, but the direction is toward giving users cryptographic guarantees without requiring them to give up the features they pay for.
