Fingerprinting Technique for YouTube Videos Identification in Network Traffic

Recently, many video streaming services, such as YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook, have contributed to video streaming traffic, leading to the possibility of streaming unwanted and inappropriate content to minors or individuals at workplaces. Therefore, monitoring such content is necessary. Although the video traffic is encrypted, several studies have proposed techniques using traffic data to decipher users’ activity on the web. Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) uses Variable Bit-Rate (VBR) - the most widely adopted video streaming technology, to ensure smooth streaming. VBR causes inconsistencies in video identification in most research. This research proposes a fingerprinting method to accommodate for VBR inconsistencies. First, bytes per second (BPS) are extracted from the YouTube video stream. Bytes per Period (BPP) are generated from the BPS, and then fingerprints are generated from these BPPs. Furthermore, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is optimized through experiments. The resulting CNN is used to detect YouTube streams over VPN, Non-VPN, and a combination of both VPN and Non-VPN network traffic.