IPTV Delivery Networks

Chapter 8IPTV Network Security: Threats and Countermeasures

M. S. A. Noman Ranak, Saiful Azad, B. M. F. Kamal Ruhee, N. Nourin Nisa, Nazrul Kabir, Mohammed Mostafizur Rahman and Kamal Z. Zamli

8.1 Introduction

As it has been offering a diversity of services such as high-quality multimedia contents, interactivity, reliability, quality of service (QoS), quality of experience (QoE) and so forth, IPTV has been attracting many consumers (Motoi and Ken'ichi, 2017; Alsaffar, Shin and Huh, 2015). In IPTV, television contents are distributed across IP-based networks that permit a customised and interactive user experience (Fati et al., 2017).

With the increasing popularity of these services, the attacks and threats to IPTV have also been increasing, and that remains an important concern. Security problems may arise at various points of IPTV networks – for instance, home networks, delivery and management networks, content source and so forth (Vasanthi and Chidambaram, 2014). An attacker may take control of the entire home network by spreading worms, viruses and Trojans, and afterwards can disrupt the service, steal the contents and so on. In delivery and management networks, authentication thefts, middleware-related problems, streaming/encoding server problems, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, etc., may arise. Therefore, service providers have been incorporating several secure techniques in their IPTV networks. To ensure a desired level of security to protect the content and end-users' ...