Aligning security and energy-efficiency using change detection and partial encryption for wireless camera networks

Wireless camera networks (WCNs) have seen widespread deployment in recent years, leading to an upsurge in monitoring and surveillance systems aimed at detecting foreign objects and changes within remote environments. However, wireless communication remains susceptible to cybersecurity threats, enabling eavesdroppers to access and manipulate confidential multimedia data effortlessly. Moreover, wireless cameras are low-power devices, encounter challenges as many state-of-the-art schemes adopt intricate security mechanisms, resulting in elevated costs, latency, and power consumption. This significantly compromises the stability of the node power and network lifetime and limits the applicability of security schemes in real-time implementations. This study addresses these issues by presenting DyimEnc, a dynamic image encryption scheme, to establish secure image transmission within wireless camera networks. The proposed scheme dynamically implements a security, complexity, and power consumption trade-off based on the currently available resources in each camera node. In the DyimEnc scheme, an effective in-node change-detection method is used to detect changes in the captured images and reduce the false transmission of images across the network. Additionally, a dynamic lightweight partial-encryption method is proposed to encrypt the edge maps of sensitive images that include changes. Moreover, a flexible key-management method is proposed for image encryption and transmission. Simulation results underscore DyimEnc's substantial impact, revealing significant reductions in power consumption, encryption cost, and transmission latency. It effectively achieves an average throughput of 254.9 KB/s and a remarkable 48 % decrease in network power consumption, showcasing a substantial 59 % improvement compared to a related study. Security analysis proved the robustness of our scheme in resisting attacks and satisfying the security requirements of WCNs.