The number of applications for cameras in security and monitoring is rising constantly. This trend is supported by improved underlying conditions, e.g. better resolutions with shrinking image sensors in cameras, rising transfer bandwidths for data, lower energy consumption or rising battery capacities for mobile camera systems like bodycams.

These systems should be reliable. To maintain reliability one also has to trust the underlying data. Even presumed non-existing image data contains information for the evaluator and therefore could be a target for manipulation attempts. But with the rising acceptance and wide distribution of such systems, the effort to prove the falsehood of recorded data is rising.

The reliability and security can be achieved with common methods, e.g. securing the data from outside access (secured servers) or allowing outside access, but storing the data in ways to make manipulation attempts costly and most of the time unbearable (distribution of information).

The objective of Trusted Cam is to establish a new secure way, based on cryptography, of storing image data publicly. The foundation are blockchain technologies which aims to secure the reliability and integritiy of data on public servers. In comparison to previous technologies, where camera images were saved multiple times in different locations to ensure protection against forgery, Trusted Cam aims to develope protection procedures and features applied directly after recording camera images without storage redundancy.

Commonly used protection features are most of the time easy to generate hash functions, which can hardly be forced and reversed due to concentration of information. The compactness of the hash and therefore the lower energy and bandwidth needed for subsequent use in comparison to the original image is a clear advantage of hash functions. The low consumption enables usage of such methods in mobile and wireless systems, which are often sensitive to energy and weight considerablely.

Furthermore linking hash values between individual cameras and other system entities enable a mutual protection against forgery of single cameras.