Real-Time Index Authentication for Event-Oriented Surveillance Video Query using Blockchain

TL;DR

This paper proposes a blockchain-based scheme for real-time, secure index authentication in event-oriented surveillance video systems across edge, fog, and cloud layers, enhancing data integrity and security.

Contribution

It introduces a novel blockchain-enabled method for protecting real-time surveillance indexes across distributed edge, fog, and cloud computing layers.

Findings

Effective blockchain-based security for index data

Reduced attack surface on edge and fog devices

Validated feasibility through experimental analysis

Abstract

Information from surveillance video is essential for situational awareness (SAW). Nowadays, a prohibitively large amount of surveillance data is being generated continuously by ubiquitously distributed video sensors. It is very challenging to immediately identify the objects of interest or zoom in suspicious actions from thousands of video frames. Making the big data indexable is critical to tackle this problem. It is ideal to generate pattern indexes in a real-time, on-site manner on the video streaming instead of depending on the batch processing at the cloud centers. The modern edge-fog-cloud computing paradigm allows implementation of time sensitive tasks at the edge of the network. The on-site edge devices collect the information sensed in format of frames and extracts useful features. The near-site fog nodes conduct the contextualization and classification of the features. The remote cloud center is in charge of more data intensive and computing intensive tasks. However, exchanging the index information among devices in different layers raises security concerns where an adversary can capture or tamper with features to mislead the surveillance system. In this paper, a blockchain enabled scheme is proposed to protect the index data through an encrypted secure channel between the edge and fog nodes. It reduces the chance of attacks on the small edge and fog devices. The feasibility of the proposal is validated through intensive experimental analysis.