Circumventing Platform Defenses at Scale: Automated Content Replication from YouTube to Blockchain-Based Decentralized Storage

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 18 Mar 2026] Circumventing Platform Defenses at Scale: Automated Content Replication from YouTube to Blockchain-Based Decentralized Storage Zeeshan Akram We present YouTube-Synch [1], a production system for automated, large-scale content extraction and replication from YouTube to decentralized storage on Joystream. The system continuously mirrors videos from more than 10,000 creator-authorized channels while handling platform constraints such as API quotas, rate limiting, bot detection, and OAuth token churn. We report a 3.5-year longitudinal case study covering 15 releases and 144 pull requests, from early API dependence to API-free operation. A key finding is that YouTube's defense layers are operationally coupled: bypassing one control often triggers another, creating cascading failures. We analyze three incidents with measured impact: 28 duplicate on-chain objects caused by database throughput issues, loss of over 10,000 channels after OAuth mass expiration, and 719 daily errors from queue pollution. For each, we describe the architectural response. Contributions include a three-generation proxy stack with behavior variance injection, a trust-minimized ownership verification protocol that replaces OAuth for channel control, write-ahead logging with cross-system state reconciliation, and containerized deployment. Results show that sustained architectural adaptation can maintain reliable cross-platform replication at production scale. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Software Engineering (cs.SE) Cite as: arXiv:2603.18071 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.18071v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.18071 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Muhammad Zeeshan Akram [view email] [v1] Wed, 18 Mar 2026 04:48:36 UTC (30 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.SE References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)