Noise-Resistant Video Channel Identification

Abstract

As the video streaming traffic grows exponentially nowadays, variable bitrate (VBR) encoding has been widely utilized by modern live video streaming service providers, such as YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch. However, video bitrate can be a delicate fingerprint of the video streaming, leading to risks of privacy leakage. There are several studies that attempt to eavesdrop the privacy from encrypted video streaming, but most of them presume strict requirements on the implementation environments and have great limitations when noise interference exists. Actually, the video traffic from the multimedia edge server is distinct from interapplication traffic flows due to device customization and can be identified even if there are noise interferences or the victim in a weak network condition. In this paper, a video traffic identification method is proposed to identify the encrypted video streaming from multimedia edge server under the interference of irrelevant traffic flows. Initially, we use an interapplication filter to identify the traffic from the edge server. Then, a longest-common-subsequence (LCS)-based method is developed for similarity matching to resist the noise interference from unpredictable burst traffic and network environment variations. In order to evaluate the system performance, we setup the prototype system with an AWS EC2 server and a raspberry pi device, then utilize the real-world trace data for pushing movies to victims. The experimental results show that the accuracy of our proposed strategy can reach 89.1% within 140 seconds eavesdropping even mixed with 14% noise interference.