Leveraging lightweight blockchain to establish data integrity for surveillance cameras

Abstract

The video footage produced by surveillance cameras is 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 for information provided by the untrusted video sources. In this paper, we present a framework to ensure the data integrity of the stored videos, allowing authorities to validate whether video footage has not been tampered with. Our proposal uses a lightweight blockchain technology to store the video metadata as blockchain transactions to support the validation of video integrity. Our evaluations show that the overhead introduced by employing the blockchain to create the transactions introduces a minor latency of a few milliseconds.