Rethinking Privacy Risks from Wireless Surveillance Camera

Huang，Qianyi1; Lu，Youjing2; Luo，Zhicheng3; Wang，Hao4; Wu，Fan2; Chen，Guihai2; Zhang，Qian5

2023-03-01

10.1145/3570504

ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks   Impact Factor & Quartile

1550-4859

1550-4867

Wireless home surveillance cameras are gaining popularity in elderly/baby care and burglary detection in an effort to make our life safer than ever before. However, even though the camera's traffic is encrypted, attackers can still infer what the residents are doing at home. Although this security loophole has been reported, it does not attract much attention from the public, as it requires the attacker to be in close proximity to the camera and have some prior knowledge about the victims. Due to these requirements, the attacker has a low chance of success in the real world. In this article, we argue that the capability of attackers has been greatly underestimated. First, the attacker can leverage the characteristics of video transport protocols to recover the metadata of missing packets. Second, the attacker can build the inference model using the public datasets and adapt the model to the real traffic. Thus, the attacker can launch the attack at a distance from the camera, without prior knowledge about the victim. We also implement this attack scenario and verify that the attacker can infer the victims' activities at a distance as large as 40 m without any knowledge about the victim, neither personal nor environmental.

Home surveillance camera security and privacy

SCI

English

Others

Key-Area Research and Development Program of Guangdong Province[2020B0101390001] ; National Natural Science Foundation of China["62002150","62025204","61972252"] ; RGC["CERG 16203719","16204820","R8015"]

Computer Science ; Telecommunications

Computer Science, Information Systems ; Telecommunications

WOS:001035842600014

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY

2-s2.0-85166352419

Scopus

1.Sun Yat-sen University,Peng Cheng Laboratory,China
2.Shanghai Jiao Tong University,China
3.Southern University of Science and Technology,China
4.Rutgers University,United States
5.Hong Kong University of Science and Technology,Hong Kong

Huang，Qianyi,Lu，Youjing,Luo，Zhicheng,et al. Rethinking Privacy Risks from Wireless Surveillance Camera[J]. ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks,2023,19(3).

Huang，Qianyi.,Lu，Youjing.,Luo，Zhicheng.,Wang，Hao.,Wu，Fan.,...&Zhang，Qian.(2023).Rethinking Privacy Risks from Wireless Surveillance Camera.ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks,19(3).

Huang，Qianyi,et al."Rethinking Privacy Risks from Wireless Surveillance Camera".ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks 19.3(2023).