Challenges in Content Security
Challenges of Content Security
For media organizations and OTT platforms, content security standards for high-value studio, live sports and events, and overall subscription content is about three major considerations – the app should be functional and speedy, the content should be protected, and users’ data should be safe and secure.
Content, especially, is the heart of the problem in OTTs. The larger the demand for video material, the greater the danger of piracy, content spoofing, and other malicious attacks, and the greater the problems information security and operations teams face in designing, maintaining, and swiftly evolving the content security of their media workflow. Their charge also becomes more difficult when we recognize the length of the content production and distribution cycle.
Challenge #1
On average, the content cycle will consist of multiple vendors - from the production team that records the content to the editing team responsible for adding VFX, handling sound dubbing etc to the coders who convert the content to standard encoding and ensure that the material is reviewed and tested for playability across all platforms and devices.
The challenge is that with multiple parties needing access to pre release content, securing the content is hard. Leaks, attacks, and spoofs can happen anywhere in the overall duration of this cycle. Content-based companies, therefore, need to have a good detection engineering team that can build processes/tools that ensure vendor awareness at all touchpoints of the content lifecycle , are capable of detecting all possible threats for each touch point, and have some hard compensating controls for every threat at each touch point.
But it is hard to identify the culprit immediately. Disaster control and response is the first urgency in the event of an attack, making investigation or forensics a second priority.
That is the first challenge – the abundance of touchpoints in the content cycle.
Challenge #2
Another challenge is the application of (Digital Rights Management) DRM policies and control.
Some video streaming providers don't allow low-end devices to stream movies or TV shows at high resolutions. That’s because, in order to prevent illicit copying and redistribution of video files, some services are made DRM-protected and are, therefore, unavailable.?
Your data can be exposed to unauthorized access from a variety of sources, one of which is remote users exchanging files. On that end, unauthorized data access has the capacity to harm reputations and shut down productions and businesses, ramifications that work on professional, personal, artistic, and financial levels. The concept of DRM is, therefore, to allow for a variety of streaming quality levels dependent on the security capabilities of the receiver.
There are a variety of DRM systems available for a variety of devices, including TVs, gaming consoles, and even browsers, to secure online content. To stream material on a specific device, TV, game console, or browser, you must use a specific DRM scheme. Currently three DRM systems are widely used:
Although DRM protection is necessary to keep their content safe from piracy on Android smartphones and other devices, there’s a tradeoff for this protection with user experience. In devices that are protected by DRM, there’s a lag in services.
For long-term prevention of content piracy, therefore, many systems must act in concert. Forensic watermarking and advanced multi-DRM solutions must be the foundation of every OTT platform's content security approach. OTT platforms must use innovative technologies to secure content integrity, expand accessibility, and securely monetize their premium content.
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Challenge #3
Internet bottlenecks increase because of the increase in OTT viewership and its associated bandwidth requirements. To respond to such bottlenecks, the OTT industry began bringing content closer to users, a strategy that eventually became known as the 'edge.' This necessitated the utilization of private content distribution networks (CDNs).Every modern online application relies on a Content Delivery Network (CDN).?
CDNs provide network and application-level protection by filtering traffic with web application firewalls and DDoS protection services installed at the edge locations and incorporated into the caching network. So, combining network bandwidth with security restrictions, it keeps bots, scrapers, and hackers at bay without sacrificing application availability or performance.
However, the challenge is that the CDN does not store dynamic content. Generally, no compute and no memory, CDNs are vulnerable to content theft, especially if the hackers are sophisticated and possess the right tools, secrets, and expertise.? While edge workers exist it still affects the bandwidth, increasing buffering, latency, and impacting the quality of video delivery service. Some CDNs rely on increasing port line rates which means the need for internal router/switch bandwidth and processing speed demand also increases.?
Challenge #4
Piracy – the most popular crime against content security.
Many tools for illegally downloading content are now readily available on the internet, and many of these programs are free to use. While most streaming sites encrypt their videos to prevent unauthorized distribution, attackers can locate the encryption keys on the internet. Even the storage platforms can be hacked by pirates to gain access to previously unreleased content.
Pirates and other unethical users frequently make use of the following sources and tools:
·? ? ? ? HDRip or WEB-DL/WEB DL: These tools allow pirates to remix the video and audio from VoD providers into an MKV container without losing quality.
·? ? ? ? WEBRIP: It allows you to extract a file from a TS, MP4, or FLV container and remix it to MKV utilizing the HLS or RTMP/E protocols. Such files are taken from DRM-free or weak DRM-encrypted releases.
·? ? ? ? WEBCAP: A WEBCap is a rip made by recording video from a DRM-protected streaming service.
VoD is regarded as a more vulnerable media than live streaming since it has several points of entry for pirates and unauthorized users to get the content. They use torrents to access P2P file-sharing services. Even the technique in which they provide pirated content to users has become standardized on these sites. It is not unusual, for example, for an unofficial Hollywood release to be given a P2P file name like "The Kominsky Method 2020 HDRip XviD B4ND1T9," with the file extension "HDRip XviD." type of information. This is the codec.name of the release team.
While some of the above challenges can be tackled with greater visibility and automated processes, there is no one right way to do content security. The ability to safeguard your content while also positioning it as a high-quality product is a complicated undertaking that has no one strategy to benefit from. Security engineers must only make value-based decisions depending on the contingencies of time and situations.