Abstract
Recent years have seen tremendous increase in crime and terrorism all over the world which has necessitated continuous surveillance of public spaces, commercial entities and residential areas. CCTV cameras are an integral part of any modern surveillance system and have evolved significantly. They are a vital part of any investigation that follows a criminal or terrorism incident by providing invaluable evidence. In this paper, we show that the Advance Systems Format (ASF) file used in most IP cameras, which is also the main file containing metadata about the streaming packets, is vulnerable to forgery. This file is stored in plain text and any technically savvy person can forge it; therefore, a mechanism is needed to prevent it. To that end, we have gathered critical artifacts from an ASF file of IP cameras and carried out their forensic analysis. The analysis performed during this study demonstrates successful detection of forgery/tampering of evidence in IP cameras.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ohaneme CO, Eke J, Azubogu AC, Ifeagwu EN, Ohaneme LC (2012) Design and implementation of an IP-based security surveillance system. IJCSI Int J Comput Sci Issues 9(5):393
Mondaini N, Caldelli R, Piva A, Barni M, Cappellini V (2007) Detection of malevolent changes in digital video for forensic applications. Security, Steganography, and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents IX, vol 6505, p 65050T. International Society for Optics and Photonics
Bayram S, Sencar H, Memon N (2008) Video copy detection based on source device characteristics: a complementary approach to content-based methods. In: 1st ACM International Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval. ACM, pp 435–442
Conotter V, O’Brien JF, Farid H (2012) Exposing digital forgeries in ballistic motion. IEEE Trans Inf Forensic Secur 7(1):283–296
Stamm MC, Lin WS, Liu KR (2012) Temporal forensics and anti-forensics for motion compensated video. IEEE Trans Inf Forensic Secur 7(4):1315–1329
Zhou Y, Zeng FZ, Yang GF (2012) The research for tamper forensics on mpeg-2 video based on compressed sensing. In: International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics (ICMLC), 2012, vol 3, pp 1080–1084. IEEE
Liu Yx, Kurceren R, Budhia U (2006) Video classification for video quality prediction. J Zhejiang Univ Sci A 7(5):919–926
Presenting digital evidence to court: security, data and privacy. http://www.bcs.org/content/ConWebDoc/7372. Accessed 30 Sept 2017
Swaminathan A, Wu M, Liu KR (2006) Component forensics of digital cameras: a nonintrusive approach. In: 2006 40th Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems, pp 1194–1199. IEEE
Bestagini P, Fontani K, Milani S, Barni M, Piva A, Tagliasacchi M, Tubaro K (2012) An overview on video forensics. In: Proceedings of the 20th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), pp 1229–1233. IEEE
Wang W, Farid H (2008) Detecting re-projected video. In: International Workshop on Information Hiding, pp 72–86, Springer
Poisel R, Tjoa S (2011) Forensics investigations of multimedia data: a review of the state-of-the-art. In: 2011 Sixth International Conference on IT Security Incident Management and IT Forensics, pp 48–61. IEEE
Wang W, Farid H (2006) Exposing digital forgeries in video by detecting double mpeg compression. In: Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Multimedia and Security, pp 37–47. ACM
Zhang J, Su Y, Zhang M (2009) Exposing digital video forgery by ghost shadow artifact. In: Proceedings of the First ACM Workshop on Multimedia in Forensics, pp 49–54. ACM
Wang W, Farid H (2007) Exposing digital forgeries in video by detecting duplication. In: Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Multimedia and Security, pp 35–42. ACM
Shotton D, Rodriguez A, Guil N, Trelles O (2002) A metadata classification schema for semantic content analysis of videos. J Microsc 205(1):3342
Qian R.J (2010) Advanced streaming format table of contents object. US Patent 7,676,495
Wei Q, Zhang Y, Zhang M, Cui M (2010) Study on synchronization for streaming media based on ASF format for e-learning. In: Web Information Systems and Mining (WISM), 2010 International Conference on, vol 1, pp 156–160. IEEE
Popescu C, Farid H (2005) Exposing digital forgeries in color filter array interpolated images. IEEE Trans Signal Process 53(10):3948–3959
Birajdar GK, Mankar VH (2013) Digital image forgery detection using passive techniques: a survey. Digit Investig 10(3):226–245
Martin T (2017) How to prevent your security camera from being hacked. https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-prevent-your-security-camera-from-being-hacked. Accessed 30 Sept 2017
Li A (2017) How to secure your wifi enabled home camera reolink blog. https://reolink.com/how-to-secure-your-wifi-enabled-home-camera. Accessed 30 Sept 2017
Howell D (2017) How to protect your home and business with IP security. http://www.techradar.com/how-to/world-of-tech/how-to-protect-your-home-and-business-with-ip-security-1296953. Accessed 30 Sept 2017
Encryption of IP Cameras. https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/56779/securingremotely-accessible-ip-cameras-that-do-not-support-https. Accessed 3 Mar 2017
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Khan, R.M., Iqbal, W., Amjad, M.F. et al. Forensic investigation to detect forgeries in ASF files of contemporary IP cameras. J Supercomput 74, 5060–5081 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-018-2377-7
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-018-2377-7