Secure and Privacy-Preserving Stored Surveillance Video Sharing atop Permissioned Blockchain

Abstract

At present, more than a billion closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras are watching the world. These cameras garner a lot of visual information that is often processed and stored in remote and centralized cloud servers. Multiple occasions have revealed that this traditional approach is plagued with security and privacy breaches. The breaches could be the interception of raw videos while in transit to distant surveillance analytics centers (SAC), infiltration to cameras and network video records (NVR), or abuse of cameras and stored videos. Hence, the traditional video surveillance system (VSS) cannot guarantee the protection of the privacy of individuals caught on CCTV cameras. Wherefore, this paper proposes a Secure and Privacy-preserving Stored surveillance video sharing (SePriS) mechanism for authorized users/nodes based on smart contracts, blockchain (BC), and the enciphering of video frames using DAB, a mechanism developed based on discrete cosine transform (DCT), advanced encryption standard (AES), and block shuffling (BS) algorithm. The BC-based solution creates an environment auspicious for creating decentralized, reliable SACs and storage sites with secure and privacy-aware sharing of stored surveillance videos across SAC nodes and by law enforcers, police departments, and courts securely connected to the SAC nodes. The experiments and analyses validate that the proposed BC-based SePriS solution achieves the design purpose.