Realizing credible remote agricultural auditing with trusted video technology

Abstract

The conventional approaches of auditing agricultural commodities from the production and transportation level to the retailers and consumers often get obstructed by the lack of human resources, delayed response, and high frequency of location updates—resulting in poor quality and safety compliance. Its digital transformation, known as remote auditing, could address these limitations to a greater extent; however, it is still subject to diverse cyberattacks, including tampering with the video streams provided for verification. Since a detailed and concurrent forensic examination of videos during remote auditing significantly increases the computational burden on the network and infrastructure, alternative or complementary solutions should be developed. This paper outlines the technical feasibility of applying digital signatures over live video streams as a way to authenticate the source during remote auditing and thus contributes to limiting the scope of potential cyber threats. It proposes design options for realizing the authentication process with trusted computing technologies at different phases, from signing the videos to transmitting them through unreliable networks. A reference prototype is also developed based on the proposed end-to-end design to quantify the performance of trusted remote agricultural auditing in terms of the frame signing time, attack resistance, and resource overhead.