AVChat Software Product Blog

1) Protection against capturing the video streams

Some software (like Replay Media Catcher) can capture (and save) any audio/video stream that you are receiving from a media server. It does that by analyzing your Internet traffic and looking for connections to media servers. When it finds one it attempts to make its own connection to the media server and thus gets access to the video stream!

AVChat 3 protects you and your users from having your streams captured by such software by disconnecting such software from the media server at regular intervals (about 20 seconds).

2) Watermarks for video streams

We’ve run into situations where certain users were capturing the video from other peoples streams using using screen capturing software and rebroadcasted it as their own video on other websites. To prevent this AVChat 3 can place a watermark over others peoples streams!

To place a watermark over the video streams edit avc_settings.xxx and change the value of the watermarkForOtherPeoplesStreams variable with the path to the desired watermark image (png and jpg images are supported).

Video Stream With Watermark On It

3) Secure communications between users (rtmps, rtmpe)

The data exchanged between the users trough the media server is exchanged using a protocol from Adobe named rtmp. rtmps and rtmpe are the secure alternatives to rtmp. rtmps is supported by both FMS and Red5 while rtmpe is only supported by FMS. When using rtmps or rtmpe all data exchanged between the users is encrypted before being sent over the Internet to the media server.

To use rtmpe with FMIS (3 or 3.5) change your connection string from rtmp://… to rtmpe:// . RTMPE requires about 15% more processing power than RTMP, read here how to disable rtmpe alltogether.

To use rtmps with FMIS you need to configure your FMS server for rtmps.

To use rtmps with Red5 you need to configure Red5 for rtmps.

4) Protection from malicious connections

AVChat 3 will reject any connections to the media server that are made from swf’s delivered from domains other than the ones for which your software was licensed. This prevents your media server from being used (for video streaming for example) by other people with swf files hosted on other websites.

5) SWF verification

FMIS (3 and 3.5) has a nice feature where you can tell it to only accept connections from certain swf files. Read here how to configure your FMIS server for SWF verification.

6) Encrypted room passwords

We’ve had issues in the past where malicious users (using special programs) would look for the password of the rooms in the memory of the computer because the passwords were stored in plain text as opposed to being encrypted.

All room passwords in AVChat 3 are now encrypted, only the creator of the room will ever know the unencrypted password.

Tags: avchat3 security

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 15:16 and is filed under documentation, tips & tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.