Demystifying Video Traffic from IoT (Spy) Camera using Undecrypted Network Traffic

Video traffic can create significant privacy and security threats to an organization or a smart home. Integration of IoT cameras has increased this problem manifold especially when there is no clear distinction among the protocols that can be used in IoT cameras and traditional video streaming or sharing applications. In this paper, we initiate a study on distinguishing video traffic in IoT cameras from that in video conferencing or sharing applications. We have used three IoT cameras, four video conferencing applications and two video sharing platforms to collect network traffic at network and above layers. We found a number of protocols like Real-time Transport Protocol, QUIC protocol, UDT protocol and TLS protocols that are used for transferring video traffic in these applications. We found that the protocols that carry IoT camera traffic have significantly different characteristics compared to that in video conferencing and sharing applications, e.g., in terms of video codec.