Steal This Movie: Automatically Bypassing DRM Protection in Streaming Media Services

Authors: 

Ruoyu Wang, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Tsinghua University; Yan Shoshitaishvili, Christopher Kruegel, and Giovanni Vigna, University of California, Santa Barbara

Abstract: 

Streaming movies online is quickly becoming the way in which users access video entertainment. This has been powered by the ubiquitous presence of the Internet and the availability of a number of hardware platforms that make access to movies convenient. Often, video-on-demand services use a digital rights management system to prevent the user from duplicating videos because much of the economic model of video stream services relies on the fact that the videos cannot easily be saved to permanent storage and (illegally) shared with other customers. In this paper, we introduce a general memory-based approach that circumvents the protections deployed by popular video-on-demand providers. We apply our approach to four different examples of streaming services: Amazon Instant Video, Hulu, Spotify, and Netflix and we demonstrate that, by using our technique, it is possible to break DRM protection in a semi-automated way.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {182951,
author = {Ruoyu Wang and Yan Shoshitaishvili and Christopher Kruegel and Giovanni Vigna},
title = {Steal This Movie: Automatically Bypassing {DRM} Protection in Streaming Media Services},
booktitle = {Presented as part of the 22nd {USENIX} Security Symposium ({USENIX} Security 13)},
year = {2013},
isbn = {978-1-931971-03-4},
address = {Washington, D.C.},
pages = {687--702},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity13/technical-sessions/paper/wang_ruoyu},
publisher = {{USENIX}},
}
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