Towards a lawfully secure and privacy preserving video surveillance system

Abstract

Privacy protection and content confidentiality in video surveillance are new challenging security issues where the basic requirements are still under discussion. They are truly interdisciplinary topics pertaining several sectors of the information society (Finance, Homeland Security, Healthcare, etc) that require inputs from legal experts, technologists, privacy advocates and general public. This work presents a novel video surveillance system that provides content confidentiality and distributed trust by using a hybrid cryptosystem based on a threshold multi-party key-sharing scheme. Due to the flexibility of the underlying video content access-control scheme, such approach can handle the problem of users loosing their private shares as well as dynamically adding new users that can participate to content reconstruction. The system can be efficiently implemented on low-cost special purpose devices. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.