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Identifying HTTPS-Protected Netflix Videos in Real-Time

Published: 22 March 2017 Publication History
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    After more than a year of research and development, Netflix recently upgraded their infrastructure to provide HTTPS encryption of video streams in order to protect the privacy of their viewers. Despite this upgrade, we demonstrate that it is possible to accurately identify Netflix videos from passive traffic capture in real-time with very limited hardware requirements. Specifically, we developed a system that can report the Netflix video being delivered by a TCP connection using only the information provided by TCP/IP headers. To support our analysis, we created a fingerprint database comprised of 42,027 Netflix videos. Given this collection of fingerprints, we show that our system can differentiate between videos with greater than 99.99% accuracy. Moreover, when tested against 200 random 20-minute video streams, our system identified 99.5% of the videos with the majority of the identifications occurring less than two and a half minutes into the video stream.

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    Cited By

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    • (2024)Identifying Video Resolution from Encrypted QUIC Streams in Segment-combined Transmission ScenariosProceedings of the 34th edition of the Workshop on Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video10.1145/3651863.3651883(50-56)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2024
    • (2023)A Survey and Analysis of TLS Interception Mechanisms and Motivations: Exploring how end-to-end TLS is made “end-to-me” for web trafficACM Computing Surveys10.1145/358052255:13s(1-40)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2023
    • (2023)Resolution Identification of Encrypted Video Streaming Based on HTTP/2 FeaturesACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications10.1145/355189119:2(1-23)Online publication date: 6-Feb-2023
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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CODASPY '17: Proceedings of the Seventh ACM on Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy
      March 2017
      382 pages
      ISBN:9781450345231
      DOI:10.1145/3029806
      This paper is authored by an employee(s) of the United States Government and is in the public domain. Non-exclusive copying or redistribution is allowed, provided that the article citation is given and the authors and agency are clearly identified as its source.

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      Publication History

      Published: 22 March 2017

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      1. Netflix
      2. dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP
      3. privacy
      4. traffic analysis

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      CODASPY '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 21 of 134 submissions, 16%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 149 of 789 submissions, 19%

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      View all
      • (2024)Identifying Video Resolution from Encrypted QUIC Streams in Segment-combined Transmission ScenariosProceedings of the 34th edition of the Workshop on Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video10.1145/3651863.3651883(50-56)Online publication date: 15-Apr-2024
      • (2023)A Survey and Analysis of TLS Interception Mechanisms and Motivations: Exploring how end-to-end TLS is made “end-to-me” for web trafficACM Computing Surveys10.1145/358052255:13s(1-40)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2023
      • (2023)Resolution Identification of Encrypted Video Streaming Based on HTTP/2 FeaturesACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications10.1145/355189119:2(1-23)Online publication date: 6-Feb-2023
      • (2023)Unveiling the Potential: Harnessing Deep Metric Learning to Circumvent Video Streaming Encryption2023 IEEE International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT)10.1109/WI-IAT59888.2023.00028(163-170)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2023
      • (2023)Telepath: A Minecraft-based Covert Communication System2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP46215.2023.10179335(2223-2237)Online publication date: May-2023
      • (2023)EVS2vec: A Low-dimensional Embedding Method for Encrypted Video Stream Analysis2023 20th Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking (SECON)10.1109/SECON58729.2023.10287432(537-545)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2023
      • (2023)Distributed Cache Performance Improvement Middleware Session2023 6th International Conference on Engineering Technology and its Applications (IICETA)10.1109/IICETA57613.2023.10351207(313-317)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2023
      • (2023)I See What You're Watching on Your Streaming Service: Fast Identification of DASH Encrypted Network Traces2023 IEEE 20th Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC)10.1109/CCNC51644.2023.10060390(1116-1122)Online publication date: 8-Jan-2023
      • (2023)Explainable YouTube Video Identification Using Sufficient Input SubsetsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.326156211(33178-33188)Online publication date: 2023
      • (2023)Context-driven encrypted multimedia traffic classification on mobile devicesPervasive and Mobile Computing10.1016/j.pmcj.2022.10173788:COnline publication date: 1-Jan-2023
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