English

Building a Privacy-Preserving Smart Camera System

Cryptography and Security 2022-01-25 v1

Abstract

Millions of consumers depend on smart camera systems to remotely monitor their homes and businesses. However, the architecture and design of popular commercial systems require users to relinquish control of their data to untrusted third parties, such as service providers (e.g., the cloud). Third parties therefore can (and in some instances have) access the video footage without the users' knowledge or consent -- violating the core tenet of user privacy. In this paper, we present CaCTUs, a privacy-preserving smart Camera system Controlled Totally by Users. CaCTUs returns control to the user; the root of trust begins with the user and is maintained through a series of cryptographic protocols, designed to support popular features, such as sharing, deleting, and viewing videos live. We show that the system can support live streaming with a latency of 2s at a frame rate of 10fps and a resolution of 480p. In so doing, we demonstrate that it is feasible to implement a performant smart-camera system that leverages the convenience of a cloud-based model while retaining the ability to control access to (private) data.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2201.09338,
  title  = {Building a Privacy-Preserving Smart Camera System},
  author = {Yohan Beugin and Quinn Burke and Blaine Hoak and Ryan Sheatsley and Eric Pauley and Gang Tan and Syed Rafiul Hussain and Patrick McDaniel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.09338},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Accepted to PETS (Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium) 2022

R2 v1 2026-06-24T08:59:17.830Z