Title: Protection of surveillance recordings via blockchain-assisted multimedia security

Authors: Zhaowei Ma; Li Zhu; F. Richard Yu; Jeremy James

Addresses: School of Information Technology, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada ' State Key Laboratory of Rail Traffic Control, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China ' School of Information Technology, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada ' Four DRobotics Corp, Ottawa, ON K2G 3R8, Canada

Abstract: Surveillance is being pervasively used, and its recording is extensively applied in practice. Thereby, protection of surveillance recordings, which is related to multimedia security, increasingly attracts research interests. Traditional techniques, such as watermarking, cryptography and steganography, focus on analysing multimedia content, resulting in high complexity and long latency, which makes them not suitable for protecting real-time surveillance applications. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain-assisted framework to protect the recordings in real-time surveillance applications. In the proposed framework, we design an algorithm that generates frame fingerprints, which involves real-time extraction of packets from surveillance multimedia streams, SHA3-512 functions, and the verification of frame consistency. We use a blockchain for preserving the frame fingerprints generated by our proposed algorithm. Different from existing works that use simulations to show the performance, we develop a real system using a service-oriented blockchain, virtualisation for distributed ledger technology (vDLT), and the effectiveness of this system is demonstrated.

Keywords: blockchain; surveillance; DPoS; delegated proof of stake; RTP; real-time transport protocol; multimedia; SHA3; cloud computing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2021.118486

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2021 Vol.37 No.2, pp.69 - 80

Received: 07 Jan 2021
Accepted: 07 Jan 2021

Published online: 27 Oct 2021 *

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