Research Article
Understanding the Brains and Brawn of Illicit Streaming App
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-031-06365-7_12, author={Kong Huang and Ke Zhang and Jiongyi Chen and Menghan Sun and Wei Sun and Di Tang and Kehuan Zhang}, title={Understanding the Brains and Brawn of Illicit Streaming App}, proceedings={Digital Forensics and Cyber Crime. 12th EAI International Conference, ICDF2C 2021, Virtual Event, Singapore, December 6-9, 2021, Proceedings}, proceedings_a={ICDF2C}, year={2022}, month={6}, keywords={Content piracy Video streaming Digital forensics}, doi={10.1007/978-3-031-06365-7_12} }- Kong Huang
Ke Zhang
Jiongyi Chen
Menghan Sun
Wei Sun
Di Tang
Kehuan Zhang
Year: 2022
Understanding the Brains and Brawn of Illicit Streaming App
ICDF2C
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-06365-7_12
Abstract
Content piracy has been the largest threat to the whole TV and Media Industry around the world causing billions of dollars of economic loss. Copyright-protected contents, including movies, live soccer matches, basketball games, dramas, etc., have been taken by “content pirates” and redistributed through the Internet. In the last few years, illegal IPTV providers in the form of an illicit streaming app running on smartphones, smart TVs, and illicit streaming devices have become extremely popular and take away significant subscription revenue from legitimate pay-TV operators around the world. In this research, we study the illicit streaming ecosystem from a new perspective by looking at the illicit streaming apps: we build a semi-automated forensic tool to analyze the common codes, libraries, and network traffic of the apps that facilitate illicit streaming services. As a result, we are able to investigate their background and identify the technology providers behind them. Our research provides insights into the proliferation of illicit streaming services in app markets, as well as the overall illicit streaming ecosystem.
