Secure Video Streaming Techniques: A Performance Overview

The need for secure video streaming has become increasingly important in the age of digitalization. With video surveillance systems being widely adopted across the world, video data has become a valuable target for unauthorized access and tampering. Both video coding and encryption techniques are critical in ensuring the security of video streams. In this review paper, we discuss existing works on video encoding and encryption techniques to provide an analysis of their merits and limitations. We analyze H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), H.265 High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and VP9 video encoding techniques in terms of quality factors like PSNR, SSIM and VMAF. We observe that H.265 offers higher compression whereas H.264 is more computationally efficient while VP9 shows better performance with high-resolution footage. We also compare the performance of block ciphers and stream ciphers such as AES, Blowfish, 3DES, ChaCha and Salsa. Our analysis shows that block ciphers provide more robust security compared to stream ciphers but at the cost of speed. We also evaluate Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC) over traditional cryptographic schemes in terms of security enhancement. From our analysis, we conclude that the combination of these techniques helps achieving a balance between computational efficiency, bandwidth consumption and the level of security offered to video streams.