Reverse Engineering a Coway Air Purifier to Ditch the Cloud

A developer reverse-engineered the Wi-Fi-enabled Coway Airmega IconS air purifier to cut its dependence on Coway's IoCare cloud, using a man-in-the-middle setup built with LLM assistance. The existing Home Assistant integration impersonates Coway's phone app but breaks repeatedly—server bans, an IoCare to IoCare+ rebrand, HTML layout changes, and outages—prompting the effort. A weak-key incident at certificate authority eMudhra in October 2026 opened a possible foothold for intercepting the device's traffic.