Side-channel information leakage of encrypted video stream in video surveillance systems
Title | Side-channel information leakage of encrypted video stream in video surveillance systems |
Publication Type | Conference Paper |
Year of Publication | 2016 |
Authors | Li, H., He, Y., Sun, L., Cheng, X., Yu, J. |
Conference Name | IEEE INFOCOM 2016 - The 35th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications |
Keywords | Cameras, cryptography, data compression, encoding, encrypted video stream traffic patterns, HIPAA regulations, home security, Human Behavior, human factors, Image coding, Metrics, off-the-shelf cameras, pubcrawl, Redundancy, residual image, Resiliency, side-channel information leakage, Streaming media, traffic size data, user basic activities, video coding, video encoding standards, video streaming, video surveillance, video surveillance systems |
Abstract | Video surveillance has been widely adopted to ensure home security in recent years. Most video encoding standards such as H.264 and MPEG-4 compress the temporal redundancy in a video stream using difference coding, which only encodes the residual image between a frame and its reference frame. Difference coding can efficiently compress a video stream, but it causes side-channel information leakage even though the video stream is encrypted, as reported in this paper. Particularly, we observe that the traffic patterns of an encrypted video stream are different when a user conducts different basic activities of daily living, which must be kept private from third parties as obliged by HIPAA regulations. We also observe that by exploiting this side-channel information leakage, attackers can readily infer a user's basic activities of daily living based on only the traffic size data of an encrypted video stream. We validate such an attack using two off-the-shelf cameras, and the results indicate that the user's basic activities of daily living can be recognized with a high accuracy. |
URL | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7524621/ |
DOI | 10.1109/INFOCOM.2016.7524621 |
Citation Key | li_side-channel_2016 |
- pubcrawl
- video surveillance systems
- video surveillance
- video streaming
- video encoding standards
- video coding
- user basic activities
- traffic size data
- Streaming media
- side-channel information leakage
- Resiliency
- residual image
- Redundancy
- Cameras
- off-the-shelf cameras
- Metrics
- Image coding
- Human Factors
- Human behavior
- home security
- HIPAA regulations
- encrypted video stream traffic patterns
- encoding
- data compression
- Cryptography