Netflix Adopts Efficient HTTPS Encryption For Its Video Streams:
Netflix has been reluctant to adopt HTTPS for its video streams so far because delivering video is already a bandwidth-heavy task, and adding encryption on top of that risked adding too much overhead. To solve this problem, the company searched for the ideal cipher and its fastest implementation.
Encrypting everything matters because third-parties can use our unique ‘tells’, be they video watching, online reading, music listening, website browsing, or other human behaviours to track us across the Internet. Some of these trackers are other companies, some of them are governments, and some are just questionable groups of hackers.
Netflix’s adoption of HTTPS for their entire service line is a good thing but, now, it’ll be important to actually test the implementations of HTTPS. Unfortunately, most implementations suffer some kind of deficiency and it’s more likely than not that Netflix’s initial deployment will be similarly flawed.