ISP can identify YouTube videos that you just watched
Muhammad Usman Shahid Khan, Syed M. A. H. Bukhari, Shazir A. Khan, Tahir Maqsood · 2021
Video streaming service providers are increasingly using end-to-end traffic encryption protocols, such as HTTPS. However, these protocols alone are not sufficient to hide the identification of the videos being watched by the clients on the network from anyone who can sniff the network traffic, such as the network administrator or ISP. In this work, we have explored the YouTube video streams for video identification. We have presented a side-channel attack and a sequential convolutional neural network (SCNN) for the task. The results have shown that even with a series of bytes per second from a two-minute sniffing of network traffic taken as a feature in the SCNN can identify the video with high accuracy without breaking the encryption.