Biblio
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.
Automation systems are gaining popularity around the world. The use of these powerful technologies for home security has been proposed and some systems have been developed. Other implementations see the user taking a central role in providing and receiving updates to the system. We propose a system making use of an Android based smartphone as the user control point. Our Android application allows for dual factor (facial and secret pin) based authentication in order to protect the privacy of the user. The system successfully implements facial recognition on the limited resources of a smartphone by making use of the Eigenfaces algorithm. The system we created was designed for home automation but makes use of technologies that allow it to be applied within any environment. This opens the possibility for more research into dual factor authentication and the architecture of our system provides a blue print for the implementation of home based automation systems. This system with minimal modifications can be applied within an industrial application.