No abstract

While the smart surveillance system enhanced by the Internet of Things (IoT) technology becomes an essential part of Smart Cities, it also brings new concerns in security of the data. Compared to the traditional surveillance systems that is built following a monolithic architecture to carry out lower level operations, such as monitoring and recording, the modern surveillance systems are expected to support more scalable and decentralized solutions for advanced video stream analysis at the large volumes of distributed edge devices. In addition, the centralized architecture of the conventional surveillance systems is vulnerable to single point of failure and privacy breach owning to the lack of protection to the surveillance feed. This position paper introduces a novel secure smart surveillance system based on microservices architecture and blockchain technology. Encapsulating the video analysis algorithms as various independent microservices not only isolates the video feed from different sectors, but also improve the system availability and robustness by decentralizing the operations. The blockchain technology securely synchronizes the video analysis databases among microservices across surveillance domains, and provides tamper proof of data in the trustless network environment. Smart contract enabled access authorization strategy prevents any unauthorized user from accessing the microservices and offers a scalable, decentralized and fine-grained access control solution for smart surveillance systems.

Due to the recent advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge-Fog-Cloud Computing technologies, the Smart Public Safety (SPS) system has become a more realistic solution for seamless public safety services that are enabled by integrating machine learning (ML) into heterogeneous edge computing networks. While SPS facilitates convenient exchanges of surveillance data streams among device owners and third-party applications, the existing monolithic service-oriented architecture (SOA) is unable to provide scalable and extensible services in a large-scale heterogeneous network environment. Moreover, traditional security solutions rely on a centralized trusted third-party authority, which not only can be a performance bottleneck or the single point of failure, but it also incurs privacy concerns on improperly use of private information. Inspired by blockchain and microservices technologies, this paper proposed a BLockchain-ENabled Decentralized Smart Public Safety (BlendSPS) system. Leveraging the hybrid blockchain fabric, a microservices based security mechanism is implemented to enable decentralized security architecture, and it supports immutability, auditability, and traceability for secure data sharing and operations among participants of the SPS system. An extensive experimental study verified the feasibility of the proposed BlendSPS that possesses security and privacy proprieties with limited overhead on IoT based edge networks.

Video Surveillance Systems (VSS) have become an essential infrastructural element of smart cities by increasing public safety and countering criminal activities. A VSS is normally deployed in a secure network to prevent the access from unauthorized personnel. Compared to traditional systems that continuously record video regardless of the actions in the frame, a smart VSS has the capability of capturing video data upon motion detection or object detection, and then extracts essential information and send to users. This increasing design complexity of the surveillance system, however, also introduces new security vulnerabilities. In this work, a smart, real-time frame duplication attack is investigated. We show the feasibility of forging the video streams in real-time as the camera's surroundings change. The generated frames are compared constantly and instantly to identify changes in the pixel values that could represent motion detection or changes in light intensities outdoors. An attacker (intruder) can remotely trigger the replay of some previously duplicated video streams manually or automatically, via a special quick response (QR) code or when the face of an intruder appear in the camera field of view. A detection technique is proposed by leveraging the real-time electrical network frequency (ENF) reference database to match with the power grid frequency.

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.