Shrink: Identification of Encrypted Video Traffic Based on QUIC

With the increasing prevalence of network videos, video traffic has become a significant portion of overall network traffic. Due to the presence of harmful content such as pornography and violence in network videos, network monitoring is necessary. However, the encryption of videos poses challenges for network monitoring. More and more video service providers are adopting QUIC as the default video transmission protocol to accelerate data transfer speeds. However, the existing methods for identifying encrypted video traffic do not apply to QUIC. Video service providers typically employ Content Delivery Network (CDN) technology to enhance user experience, which can result in missing video chunks for side-channel identification. Additionally, fluctuations in network conditions can lead to the retransmission of video chunks. This paper proposes Shrink, a QUIC-based encrypted video traffic identification method. It effectively extracts video chunks from online QUIC encrypted video traffic and proposes a bucket structure and global-local match to alleviate the issues of video chunks retransmission and loss. Furthermore, a bucket word dictionary is designed to enhance the method’s running speed. Experimental results demonstrate that Shrink performs well in real network environments, exhibiting superior accuracy and speed compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.