Paper 2025/491

Blind Brother: Attribute-Based Selective Video Encryption

Eugene Frimpong, Tampere University
Bin Liu, Tampere University, grchain.io
Camille Nuoskala, Tampere University
Antonis Michalas, Tampere University, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden
Abstract

The emergence of video streams as a primary medium for communication and the demand for high-quality video sharing over the internet have given rise to several security and privacy issues, such as unauthorized access and data breaches. To address these limitations, various Selective Video Encryption (SVE) schemes have been proposed, which encrypt specific portions of a video while leaving others unencrypted. The SVE approach balances security and usability, granting unauthorized users access to certain parts while encrypting sensitive content. However, existing SVE schemes adopt an all-or-nothing coarse-grain encryption approach, where a user with a decryption key can access all the contents of a given video stream. This paper proposes and designs a fine-grained access control-based selective video encryption scheme, ABSVE, and a use-case protocol called \protocol. Our scheme encrypts different identified Regions of Interest (ROI) with a unique symmetric key and applies a Ciphertext Policy Attribute Based Encryption (CP-ABE) scheme to tie these keys to specific access policies. This method provides multiple access levels for a single encrypted video stream. Crucially, we provide a formal syntax and security definitions for ABSVE, allowing for rigorous security analysis of this and similar schemes -- which is absent in prior works. Finally, we provide an implementation and evaluation of our protocol in the Kvazaar HEVC encoder. Overall, our constructions enhance security and privacy while allowing controlled access to video content and achieve comparable efficiency to compression without encryption.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Major revision. The 15th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY'25)
Keywords
Access ControlAttribute-Based EncryptionHEVCSelective Video Encryption
Contact author(s)
eugene frimpong @ tuni fi
bin liu @ tuni fi
camille nuoskala @ tuni fi
antonios michalas @ tuni fi
History
2025-03-17: approved
2025-03-15: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2025/491
License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
CC BY-NC-SA

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/491,
      author = {Eugene Frimpong and Bin Liu and Camille Nuoskala and Antonis Michalas},
      title = {Blind Brother: Attribute-Based Selective Video Encryption},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/491},
      year = {2025},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/491}
}
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