Leveraging lightweight blockchain to establish data integrity for surveillance cameras

TL;DR

This paper proposes a lightweight blockchain-based framework to ensure data integrity, auditability, and non-repudiation of surveillance videos in an airport ecosystem, with minimal latency overhead.

Contribution

It introduces a novel lightweight blockchain approach to verify and audit surveillance video integrity from untrusted sources in a multi-entity environment.

Findings

Minimal latency overhead of a few milliseconds

Effective validation of video integrity and non-repudiation

Framework suitable for real-time surveillance environments

Abstract

The video footage produced by the surveillance cameras is an important evidence to support criminal investigations. Video evidence can be sourced from public (trusted) as well as private (untrusted) surveillance systems. This raises the issue of establishing integrity and auditability for information provided by the untrusted video sources. In this paper, we focus on a airport ecosystem, where multiple entities with varying levels of trust are involved in producing and exchanging video surveillance information. We present a framework to ensure the data integrity of the stored videos, allowing authorities to validate whether video footage has not been tampered. Our proposal uses a lightweight blockchain technology to store the video metadata as blockchain transactions to support the validation of video integrity. The proposed framework also ensures video auditability and non-repudiation. Our evaluations show that the overhead introduced by employing the blockchain to create and query the transactions introduces a very minor latency of a few milliseconds.