Stealthy Peers: Understanding Security Risks of WebRTC-Based Peer-Assisted Video Streaming

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Tang, Siyuan, Alowaisheq, Eihal, Mi, Xianghang, Chen, Yi, Wang, XiaoFeng, Dou, Yanzhi
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866912440384487424
author Tang, Siyuan
Alowaisheq, Eihal
Mi, Xianghang
Chen, Yi
Wang, XiaoFeng
Dou, Yanzhi
author_facet Tang, Siyuan
Alowaisheq, Eihal
Mi, Xianghang
Chen, Yi
Wang, XiaoFeng
Dou, Yanzhi
contents As an emerging service for in-browser content delivery, peer-assisted delivery network (PDN) is reported to offload up to 95\% of bandwidth consumption for video streaming, significantly reducing the cost incurred by traditional CDN services. With such benefits, PDN services significantly impact today's video streaming and content delivery model. However, their security implications have never been investigated. In this paper, we report the first effort to address this issue, which is made possible by a suite of methodologies, e.g., an automatic pipeline to discover PDN services and their customers, and a PDN analysis framework to test the potential security and privacy risks of these services. Our study has led to the discovery of 3 representative PDN providers, along with 134 websites and 38 mobile apps as their customers. Most of these PDN customers are prominent video streaming services with millions of monthly visits or app downloads (from Google Play). Also found in our study are another 9 top video/live streaming websites with each equipped with a proprietary PDN solution. Most importantly, our analysis on these PDN services has brought to light a series of security risks, which have never been reported before, including free riding of the public PDN services, video segment pollution, exposure of video viewers' IPs to other peers, and resource squatting. All such risks have been studied through controlled experiments and measurements, under the guidance of our institution's IRB. We have responsibly disclosed these security risks to relevant PDN providers, who have acknowledged our findings, and also discussed the avenues to mitigate these risks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2212_02740
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Stealthy Peers: Understanding Security Risks of WebRTC-Based Peer-Assisted Video Streaming
Tang, Siyuan
Alowaisheq, Eihal
Mi, Xianghang
Chen, Yi
Wang, XiaoFeng
Dou, Yanzhi
Cryptography and Security
As an emerging service for in-browser content delivery, peer-assisted delivery network (PDN) is reported to offload up to 95\% of bandwidth consumption for video streaming, significantly reducing the cost incurred by traditional CDN services. With such benefits, PDN services significantly impact today's video streaming and content delivery model. However, their security implications have never been investigated. In this paper, we report the first effort to address this issue, which is made possible by a suite of methodologies, e.g., an automatic pipeline to discover PDN services and their customers, and a PDN analysis framework to test the potential security and privacy risks of these services. Our study has led to the discovery of 3 representative PDN providers, along with 134 websites and 38 mobile apps as their customers. Most of these PDN customers are prominent video streaming services with millions of monthly visits or app downloads (from Google Play). Also found in our study are another 9 top video/live streaming websites with each equipped with a proprietary PDN solution. Most importantly, our analysis on these PDN services has brought to light a series of security risks, which have never been reported before, including free riding of the public PDN services, video segment pollution, exposure of video viewers' IPs to other peers, and resource squatting. All such risks have been studied through controlled experiments and measurements, under the guidance of our institution's IRB. We have responsibly disclosed these security risks to relevant PDN providers, who have acknowledged our findings, and also discussed the avenues to mitigate these risks.
title Stealthy Peers: Understanding Security Risks of WebRTC-Based Peer-Assisted Video Streaming
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.02740