Detecting Proxies Relaying Streaming Internet Traffic

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have to manage vast quantities of data being transmitted by customers on their networks. They can also be responsible for hosting broadcast material, such as live sports. One of the main issues in handling broadcasts is preventing piracy, in this case a customer relaying broadcast material to non customers. A challenge for detecting illegal relays of content is the incompleteness of information arising from packet sampling commonly seen in an ISP perspective. In this paper, we explore how to extract strong signals of content relay that are robust to sampling by using a weighted metric to efficiently measure correlation of content streams. Our results indicate that this signal provides a clear distinction between proxy-traffic and non-relayed network behaviour.