Centipede: Leveraging the Distributed Camera Crowd for Cooperative Video Data Storage

Surveillance cameras have been extensively used in smart cities and high security zones. However, with the exploding deployment of smart cameras, the rapid growth of cloud workloads from vision-based IoT applications are becoming a huge burden for all cloud service providers. Some researchers have proposed mechanisms, such as compression and deduplication to reduce the video traffic size, but these methods cannot offset the enormous growth of data volume. Most of the surveillance video data do not need to be proceeded in real time. By making use of the IoT camera’s onboard resources to store the data, the cloud workloads can be fundamentally reduced. However, recent incidents have posed a new, powerful geo-range attack, where the attacker may compromise a group of surveillance cameras located within an area. Existing simple onboard solutions cannot offer secure defense against such geo-range attacks. To tackle the problem, we develop
Centipede
, a cooperative video data storage system that distributes video content across geographically dispersed surveillance cameras. It generates secure copies for the video content and enhances data security by judiciously distributing erasure-coded video blocks across optimally-chosen surveillance cameras. In this article, we implement
Centipede
and evaluate its performance.
Centipede
is the first solution that can fundamentally reduce the cloud workload and defend against geo-range attacks.