Hosting password protected videos for my iphone app

I am building a paid iphone application which - shows some premium content videos to the user. - app loads a page from my webserver in UIWebView - but the videos are hosted at some other video hosting site.

I realize that, in order for me to be keep this app paid, I need to keep the video links protected/secure (else if the urls are leaked, no one is going to want to pay for it).

I can easily password protect the webpage (pointing to the actual video) and make the user name and password available to the iphone app to access this webpage. But when the user selects the video link, the app will load that url. If user sniffed the packets on the iphone at this time, they could get access to the url and just run it from there directly.

I dont believe mod_sec_download or mod_xsendfile can work in this scenario because the video link is external. Right?

Is Amazon S3 a po开发者_如何学Pythonssible solution?

Would appreciate any insight/solution.

Thanks!

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Don't point directly to a video file. That'll make it trivial to steal. instead, point at a proxy script that can check the source of the request and verify that it's coming from a registered purchaser.

With appropriate one-time tokens, tracking of usage, etc... you can keep most people from sucking your site dry. And of course, the best practice is to embed a watermark into the video as it plays, so that even if it gets stolen, you can track it back to the first person to release it.

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You might want to take a look at the OWASP Top 10 and in particular, number 8 about failure to restrict URL access. This is effectively your scenario: you have resources which need to be secured at the server level. You can't just do this from the device end, the location of resources requested by the device is easily discoverable.

So it comes down to access controls on the resources, in this case, your videos. How you do this will depend in part on your server stack. For example, IIS7 has an integrated pipeline which can apply access controls to resources of any type such as PDFs, images and videos (more on this in OWASP Top 10 for .NET developers part 8: Failure to Restrict URL Access). Alternatively, you'll need some form of application proxy which can take responsibility for the authentication then delivery of the video content.

This is really more of a webserver issue than an iPhone issue. Focus on getting the access controls right on the server then the iPhone end will be a much more straight forward process.