Security Analysis of AWS-based Video Surveillance Systems

In the last few years, Cloud computing technology has benefited many organizations that have embraced it as a basis for revamping the IT infrastructure. Cloud computing utilizes Internet capabilities in order to use other computing resources. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most widely used cloud providers that leverages the endless computing capabilities that the cloud technology has to offer. AWS is continuously evolving to offer a variety of services, including but not limited to, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and packaged software as a service. Among the other important services offered by AWS is Video Surveillance as a Service (VSaaS) that is a hosted cloud-based video surveillance service. Even though this technology is complex and widely used, some security experts have pointed out that some of its vulnerabilities can be exploited in launching attacks aimed at cloud technologies. In this paper, we present a holistic security analysis of cloud-based video surveillance systems by examining the vulnerabilities, threats, and attacks that these technologies are susceptible to. We illustrate our findings by implementing several of these attacks on a test bed representing an AWS-based video surveillance system. The main contributions of our paper are: (1) we provided a holistic view of the security model of cloud based video surveillance summarizing the underlying threats, vulnerabilities and mitigation techniques (2) we proposed a novel taxonomy of attacks targeting such systems (3) we implemented several related attacks targeting cloud-based video surveillance system based on an AWS test environment and provide some guidelines for attack mitigation. The outcome of the conducted experiments showed that the vulnerabilities of the Internet Protocol (IP) and other protocols granted access to unauthorized VSaaS files. We aim that our proposed work on the security of cloud-based video surveillance systems will serve as a reference for cybersecurity researchers and practitioners who aim to conduct research in this field.