SecSCS: A User-Centric Secure Smart Camera System Based on Blockchain

Xinyuan Qian, Hongwei Li, Haoyong Wang, Guowen Xu, Shengmin Xu, Ju Ren

Abstract: Smart cameras have gained immense popularity in commercial markets for their safety and security capabilities. Yet, the prevalent design of these intelligent camera systems often compels users to cede control of their data to poten-tially untrusted service providers, such as cloud services. This relinquishment can lead to unauthorized data access by these intermediaries, posing significant security and privacy risks. The conventional solutions have been to employ privacy-enhancing technologies to bypass these intermediaries, but at the cost of increased overhead for video streaming and sharing. In our study, we introduce SecSCS, a user-centric, blockchain-based secure camera system that incorporates essential features like video streaming, sharing, deletion, and permission restoration. SecSCS integrates a blockchain-enabled user login protocol with a secure device pairing mechanism that combines visual authorization with blockchain to flexibly manage the device ownership. We utilize blockchain to provide integrity protection for the video clips stored remotely, ensuring the video data remains tamper-proof. Furthermore, we present a video frame compression and a fast video encryption method aimed at boosting the efficiency of smart camera systems. Our evaluations show that, in comparison to the leading decentralized scheme, CaCTUs, SecSCS improves the computational and communication overhead for live streaming by a factor of 12.58 and 11.29, respectively, at a frame rate of 24 fps and a resolution of 720p.