Secure image transmissions in wireless multimedia sensor networks

The strong need for secure wireless multimedia services such as privacy and confidentiality, integrity and authenticity, has driven the development of an emerging research area in low cost wireless multimedia sensor networks. However, traditional security (encryption/authentication) techniques cannot be directly applied to secure multimedia over wireless sensor networks due to the inborn challenges such as limited energy, computing and bandwidth resources, as well as the error prone wireless channel which provides an open media vulnerable to malicious interception and packet injection attacks. This chapter presents an overview of the state-of-the-art research progresses for resource-quality-driven secure multimedia (using digital image as an illustrative example) over wireless sensor networks. The existing security techniques for multimedia services and their applications to secure wireless multimedia sensor networks are reviewed. Furthermore, frontier researches on digital image selective encryption and image stream authentication and their optimizations within energy-constrained wireless sensor networks are reviewed and discussed in depth. Finally, the interactive encryption/authentication and cross layer resource allocation schemes are investigated and advocated to achieve energy efficiency, multimedia security and media quality jointly.