User-generated content (UGC) and professionally generated Content (PGC) platforms are two common scenarios in the video industry where video content can be freely uploaded and shared.
However, third-party video platforms may impersonate normal users to upload videos to your platform and then put the URLs of those videos on their own platforms. In this way, they can "live" on your platform like a parasite and get "free" access to video storage and playback acceleration. As a result, your video platform is used maliciously by others as a free video hosting service, which is called "malicious video hosting".
Malicious video hosting can cause serious economic losses since all the storage, bandwidth, and traffic fees incurred by the parasites have to be borne by you.
Note:Arrows in the figure represent the network request directions.
Generally, a UGC or PGC video platform interacts with content providers, content consumers, and VOD in the following ways (for more information on steps 1–3, please see Upload from Client):
fileId
and playback URL of the uploaded video.Note:Arrows in the figure represent the network request directions.
A malicious third-party video platform impersonates a normal user of your platform:
The ultimate purpose of malicious video hosting is to steal others' CDN bandwidth resources (while taking advantage of their storage resources). Malicious users do so mainly for the following:
In view of the core causes of malicious video hosting listed above, the key solutions lie in:
The following describes how VOD helps you restrict playback of and access to URLs.
VOD's key hotlink protection provides the ability to limit the number of devices allowed to play back a video from a URL, so as to prevent the URL from being distributed to any number of devices for playback.
In order to implement effective control of the playback URL, you need to enable hotlink protection in the console; in step 4, a hotlink protection-enabled URL needs to be generated on the application backend according to the key hotlink protection URL generation rules (please see the example of "maximum number of IPs allowed for playback at a video playback address") in order to limit the validity period of the URL and the number of IPs allowed for playback.
Restricting playback of URLs alone cannot effectively prevention malicious video hosting. This is because in step 4, a malicious platform can make countless requests for different hotlink protection-enabled URLs for the same video and then distribute those URLs to its own users, thus bypassing the restriction on the number of IPs allowed for playback.
In response, the application backend needs to verify user identity in step 4 and impose frequency control, i.e., how many times an individual user can get the same playback URL within a specified period of time. This can prevent malicious users from getting a large number of video playback addresses in a short period of time.
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