Secure communication platform for distributed city-wide surveillance systems

Managing a modern IP-based city-wide surveillance system requires that sensors and actuators in the system are visible to multiple computation and co-ordination nodes deployed in the surveillance network. As current and future surveillance systems can often consist of multiple independently managed local-area networks utilizing network address translation, it is not guaranteed that the nodes can communicate with each other. One approach for overcoming this challenge is to utilize a dedicated proxy visible to all parties to mediate all communication between the nodes. The mediated data must be secure from end-to-end particularly in the context of surveillance systems due to the confidentiality of the data. In this paper a secure communication platform called dROS is presented. The platform enables secure end-to-end communication between nodes deployed in multiple networks.