Leveraging lightweight blockchain to establish data integrity for surveillance cameras
This addresses the issue of verifying untampered video evidence for criminal investigations, though it is incremental as it applies existing blockchain technology to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring data integrity and auditability for video footage from untrusted surveillance sources, such as in an airport ecosystem, by proposing a lightweight blockchain framework to store video metadata, with evaluations showing it introduces only a few milliseconds of latency.
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.