Method and apparatus for tamper proof camera logs

• US 8,447,989 B2
• Filed: 10/02/2008
• Issued: 05/21/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 10/02/2008
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Ricoh Company Limited
• Original Assignee: Ricoh Company Limited
• Inventors: Barrus, John, Gormish, Michael, Chemishkian, Sergey
• Primary Examiner(s): McNally, Michael S
• Application Number:
  US12/244,714
• Publication Number:
  US 20100088522A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,692 Days
• Field of Search: 713/181
• US Class Current: 713/181
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 21/64 Protecting data integrity, e.g. using checksums, certificates or signatures
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2221/2101 Auditing as a secondary aspect
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 63/123 received data contents, e.g. message integrity
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 9/3242 involving keyed hash functions, e.g. message authentication codes [MACs], CBC-MAC or HMAC

Abstract

A method and apparatus for maintaining a tamper proof device log are described. In one embodiment, the method comprises maintaining an embedded log in the device, the embedded log being a chain of log entries. In one embodiment, the method may also comprise publishing at least one log entry to a location external to the device.

Claims

1. A method, comprising:

maintaining an embedded log in a device with at least one sensor, the at least one sensor for capturing media data and the embedded log being a chain of log entries;

adding at least one new log entry to the embedded log when media data is captured by the at least one sensor of the device, wherein at least one previous log entry is added to one of a plurality of metadata fields of a media data file for the captured media data, and the at least one new log entry includes a hash of the media data file; and

publishing the at least one new log entry to a location external to the device.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the at least one new log entry includes one additional log entry for each of the captured sensor data and metadata created by the device that is associated with the captured sensor data.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein the captured sensor data is one of a picture data, audio data, video data, temperature, global positioning data, chemical sensor data, or a new version of media data stored on the device edited from an existing media data.

4. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

uploading the captured sensor data and the at least one new entry from a mirrored log to a computing device, wherein the computing device is operable to publish the at least one log entry to the location external to the device from the mirrored log.

5. The method of claim 4, wherein the embedded log is maintained in a storage of the device inaccessible to the location external to the device, and the mirrored log is stored in storage of the device accessible to the location external to the device.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the at least one log entry is published to the location external to the device from a communications interface of the device.

7. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

publishing an existing log entry to the location external to the device periodically even when no new sensor data has been captured by the device since a last publication to the location external to the device.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the at least one new log entry is published to the location external to the device to entangle the at least one new log entry with a log maintained at the location external to the device.

9. The method of claim 8, further comprising:

receiving publication results from the location external to the device, wherein the publication results include a log entry from the log maintained at the location external to the device; and

adding at least one new entry to the embedded log based on the publication results.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein the one of a plurality of metadata fields is not altered when the media data file is compressed.

11. A non-transitory computer readable storage medium storing instructions thereon which, when executed by a system, cause the system to perform a method comprising:

maintaining an embedded log in a device with at least one sensor, the at least one sensor for capturing media data and the embedded log being a chain of log entries;

adding at least one new log entry to the embedded log when media data is captured by the at least one sensor of the device, wherein at least one previous log entry is added to one of a plurality of metadata fields of a media data file for the captured media data, and the at least one new log entry includes a hash of the media data file; and

publishing the at least one new log entry to a location external to the device.

12. A media capture device, comprising:

a memory of the media capture device to store an embedded log in the media capture device, the embedded log being a chain of log entries;

an image sensor to capture image data;

a hash engine to add at least one new log entry to the embedded log when the image data is captured by the image sensor, wherein at least one previous log entry is added to one of a plurality of metadata fields of an image file for the captured image data, and the at least one new log entry includes a hash of the image data file; and

a communications interface to publish the at least one new log entry to a location external to the media capture device.

13. The media capture device of claim 12, wherein the at least one new log entry includes one additional log entry for each of the captured image data and metadata associated with the captured image data.

14. The media capture device of claim 13, wherein the metadata includes one or more of a timestamp, a geospatial marker, and an edit operation associated with the media data.

15. The media capture device of claim 13, wherein the metadata includes a plurality of prior log entries from the embedded log.

16. The media capture device of claim 12, further comprising:

a removable storage coupled with the media capture device to store a mirrored log synchronized with the embedded log.

17. The media capture device of claim 16, wherein the memory of the media capture device is inaccessible to the location external to the digital camera, and the removable storage is accessible to the location external to the digital camera.