Deceptive Techniques to Hide a Compressed Video Stream for Information Security

Sensors (Basel). 2021 Oct 29;21(21):7200. doi: 10.3390/s21217200.

Abstract

With the recent development of video compression methods, video transmission on traditional devices and video distribution using networks has increased in various devices such as drones, IP cameras, and small IoT devices. As a result, the demand for encryption techniques such as MPEG-DASH for transmitting streams over networks is increasing. These video stream security methods guarantee stream confidentiality. However, they do not hide the fact that the encrypted stream is being transmitted over the network. Considering that sniffing attacks can analyze the entropy of the stream and scan huge amounts of traffic on the network, to solve this problem, the deception method is required, which appears unencrypted but a confidential stream. In this paper, we propose the new deception method that utilizes standard NAL unit rules of video codec, where the unpromised device shows the cover video and the promised device shows the secret video for deceptive security. This method allows a low encryption cost and the stream to dodge entropy-based sniffing scan attacks. The proposed stream shows that successful decoding using five standard decoders and processing performance was 61% faster than the conventional encryption method in the test signal conformance set. In addition, a network encrypted stream scan method the HEDGE showed classification results that our stream is similar to a compressed video.

Keywords: H.263; H.264/AVC; IVC; codec; deceptive techniques; high efficiency video coding; information security; video encryption.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Computer Security*
  • Confidentiality
  • Data Compression*