Video Aficionado: We Know What You Are Watching

Users enjoy the convenience of watching videos on smart devices. However, video watching records can be exposed without users’ knowledge and be exploited to infer private information. In this paper, we design and implement a new side-channel attack system, named video aficionado, which can identify video watching information without violating any access control policies on Android. Our system only needs to collect power consumption data of a video playing app, which does not require explicit user permission. The collected data is sent to a remote server, where noise is cleaned and identified by a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) trained classifier. We evaluate our proposed system through a set of carefully designed experiments. Experimental results demonstrate that our system can make an identification with 74.5 percent accuracy on average for each 20-second power measurement segment out of 3918 segments collected from 20 videos. To the best of our knowledge, video aficionado is the first real-time power consumption-based video identification system on smart devices.