Information Leakage in the Slingbox
…despite the use of encryption, a passive eavesdropper can still learn private information about what someone is watching via their Slingbox Pro.
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First, in order to conserve bandwidth, the Slingbox Pro uses something called variable bitrate (VBR) encoding. VBR is a standard approach for compressing streaming multimedia. At a very abstract level, the idea is to only transmit the differences between frames. This means that if a scene changes rapidly, the Slingbox Pro must still transmit a lot of data. But if the scene changes slowly, the Slingbox Pro will only have to transmit a small amount of data—a great bandwidth saver.
Now notice that different movies have different visual effects (e.g., some movies have frequent and rapid scene changes, others don’t). The use of VBR encodings therefore means that the amount data transmitted over time can serve as a fingerprint for a movie. And, since encryption alone won’t fully conceal the number of bytes transmitted, this fingerprint can survive encryption!
We experimented with fingerprinting encrypted Slingbox Pro movie transmissions in our lab. We took 26 of our favorite movies (we tried to pick movies from the same director, or multiple movies in a series), and we played them over our Slingbox Pro. Sometimes we streamed them to a laptop attached to a wired network, and sometimes we streamed them to a laptop connected to an 802.11 wireless network. In all cases the laptop was one hop away.
We trained our system on some of those traces. We then took new query traces for these movies and tried to match them to our database. For over half of the movies, we were able to correctly identify the movie over 98% of the time. This is well above the less than 4% accuracy that one would get by random chance.
More details in the paper.
so what? • June 4, 2007 2:23 PM
Does this matter? In this context, the encryption exists not to prevent others from knowing what you are watching, rather, it exists to prevent others from watching it themselves. It’s an enforcement mechanism for the Slingbox’s the “one viewer at a time” rule. Sure, it’s imperfect, but they want to minimize risk of getting sued for copyright infringement. AFAIK, they do not claim to protect the identity of the content you stream.