Protect progressive download videos in Azure Media Services

Question

I am considering Azure Media Services to host some of my corporate videos so that I can provide them to my users through my corporate website. The reason I am looking for Azure Media Services is because of the Progressive Download Adaptive bitrate streaming feature. My plan is to upload the videos to AMS and then use the progressive download locator in the <video> tags. I did some demos and it looks fine. However the only concern I have is with the URL. The assets are confidential and the security team raised a concern of having the security tokens in the URL. From their perspective anyone who has this URL can download the files, without logging into the corporate site.

I feel like this is how it works and there no other option to secure the assets. Am I correct? Are there any best practices or guideline that I can use to secure these Azure hosted assets?

My goal is to restrict the possibility of a user (or a hacker) directly accessing the files with the URL seen in the HTML source (the <video> tag's src attribute).

Answer 1

for this scenario, it's best to secure the video content with a content protection such as AES-128 clear key encryption. For corporate network videos (trusted end-users) the content is encrypted from access by a third-party and setting up encryption is simple. Have a look at the public docs:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/media-services/media-services-protect-with-aes128