An important piece of risk assessment is understanding your adversaries. Often, this can degenerate into an assumption of perfect adversaries. Yet when we think about risk, understanding that our adversaries have different capabilities is critical to formulating reasonable security frameworks. Nowhere is this more true than in the streaming media space.

Brian Sniffen (a colleague at Akamai) recently presented a paper at FAST exploring ways of considering different adversaries, especially in the context of different business models. He presents some interesting concepts worth exploring if you're in the space:

• Defense in breadth: The concept of using different security techniques to protect distinct attack surfaces, specifically looking at defeating how a specific adversary type is prone to conduct attacks.
• Tag-limited adversaries: An extension to the Dolev-Yao adversary (a perfect adversary who sits inline on a communication stream), the tag-limited adversary may only have knowledge, capabilities, or desire to conduct attacks within a limited vocabulary.

His paper is also a good primer on thinking about streaming threat models.