Using Visual Challenges to Verify the Integrity of Security Cameras

Abstract

We propose a new way to verify the integrity and freshness of footage from security cameras by sending visual challenges to the area being monitored by the camera. We study the effectiveness of periodically updating plain text and QR code visual challenges, propose attack detection statistics for each of them, and study their performance under normal conditions (without attack) and against a variety of adversaries. Our implementation results show that visual challenges are an effective method to add defense-in-depth mechanisms to improve the trustworthiness of security cameras.