Smart cameras with onboard signcryption for securing IoT applications

Abstract

Cameras are expected to become key sensor devices for various internet of things (IoT) applications. Since cameras often capture highly sensitive information, security is a major concern. Our approach towards data security for smart cameras is rooted on protecting the captured images by signcryption based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). Signcryption achieves resource-efficiency by performing data signing and encryption in a single step. By running the signcryption on the sensing unit, we can relax some security assumptions for the camera host unit which typically runs a complex software stack. We introduce our system architecture motivated by a typical case study for camera-based IoT applications, evaluate security properties and present performance results of an ARM-based implementation.