Identifying Video Resolution from Encrypted QUIC Streams in Segment-combined Transmission Scenarios
Yuanjie Zhao, Hua Wu, L.-S. Chen, Songtao Liu, Guang Cheng, Xiaoyan Hu · 2024
With the rapid rise of video services, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) need to better monitor the Quality of Experience (QoE). Video resolution is a crucial factor affecting QoE. However, with the widespread use of QUIC based on UDP for video transmission, existing resolution identification methods based on the TCP header information cannot extract information from the UDP header. Moreover, in recent years, video platforms have begun to send video segments using random combinations to avoid side-channel attacks, leading to the failure of existing machine learning-based methods. To address this problem, we propose a method to identify the video resolution from QUIC traffic. The method takes the length of the video segment sequence as fingerprints, uses the features of QUIC to accurately extract and correct the length of the video segment sequence from the encrypted video stream, and then uses a combinatorial matching method to identify the corresponding video segment, thus accurately identifying the resolution of the video segment. Experimental results using YouTube videos show that the accuracy of this method for video resolution identification is more than 97%, and the average identification time is 0.13 seconds. Using this method, ISPs can accurately identify the resolution of videos transmitted via QUIC in real-time, which provides a basis for monitoring users' QoE.