Abstract
Nowadays, there is an increasing number of cameras placed on mobile devices connected to the Internet. Since these cameras acquire and process sensitive and vulnerable data in applications such as surveillance or monitoring, security is essential to avoid cyberattacks. However, cameras on mobile devices have constraints in size, computation and power consumption, so that lightweight security techniques should be considered. Camera identification techniques guarantee the origin of the data. Among the camera identification techniques, Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) allow generating unique, distinctive and unpredictable identifiers from the hardware of a device. PUFs are also very suitable to obfuscate secret keys (by binding them to the hardware of the device) and generate random sequences (employed as nonces). In this work, we propose a trusted camera based on PUFs and standard cryptographic algorithms. In addition, a protocol is proposed to protect the communication with the trusted camera, which satisfies authentication, confidentiality, integrity and freshness in the data communication. This is particularly interesting to carry out camera control actions and firmware updates. PUFs from Static Random Access Memories (SRAMs) are selected because cameras typically include SRAMs in its hardware. Therefore, additional hardware is not required and security techniques can be implemented at low cost. Experimental results are shown to prove how the proposed solution can be implemented with the SRAM of commercial Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) chips included in the communication module of the camera. A proof of concept shows that the proposed solution can be implemented in low-cost cameras.
Highlights
Cameras are employed in many applications that require high security, like the widely used surveillance systems
We present a trusted camera based on Static Random Access Memories (SRAMs) Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) extracted from the hardware modules of the camera, without extra hardware required (SRAMs are readily present in many parts of a camera), with very low extra power consumption, with a lightweight processing cost, and integrated into a complete cryptographic solution
Our proposal is to employ standard cryptographic techniques in the normal operation mode and the camera by its SRAM PUF, so that only a genuine camera with its SRAM PUF and its non-sensitive identify the camera by its SRAM PUF, so that only a genuine camera with its SRAM PUF and its information stored in its non-volatile memory is able to reconstruct the cryptographic key
Summary
Cameras are employed in many applications that require high security, like the widely used surveillance systems. In contrast to metadata (which are externally assigned to the camera), or identifiers extracted from the captures (which depend on the type of external scenes), hardware-based PUFs are intrinsic to the camera and are directly extracted from the camera hardware [23,24,25,26,27] These PUFs allow adding security functionalities at a low cost, without burdening the processing unit of the camera. This is why this paper presents a camera identification technique using hardware-based PUFs. Encryption algorithms should be selected carefully to provide real-time performance with low-cost cameras on mobile devices, which have constrained computing and memory resources.
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