A lightweight blockchain-based privacy protection for smart surveillance at the edge

Witnessing the increasingly pervasive deployment of security video surveillance systems(VSS), more and more individuals have become concerned with the issues of privacy violations. While the majority of the public have a favorable view of surveillance in terms of crime deterrence, individuals do not accept the invasive monitoring of their private life. To date, however, there is not a lightweight and secure privacy-preserving solution for video surveillance systems. The recent success of blockchain (BC) technologies and their applications in the Internet of Things (IoT) shed a light on this challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a Lightweight, Blockchain-based Privacy protection (Lib-Pri) scheme for surveillance cameras at the edge. It enables the VSS to perform surveillance without compromising the privacy of people captured in the videos. The Lib-Pri system transforms the deployed VSS into a system that functions as a federated blockchain network capable of carrying out integrity checking, blurring keys management, feature sharing, and video access sanctioning. The policy-based enforcement of privacy measures is carried out at the edge devices for real-time video analytics without cluttering the network.