ABSTRACT
The use of network covert channels to improve privacy or support security threats has been widely discussed in the literature. As today, the totality of works mainly focuses on how to not disrupt the overt traffic flow and the performance of the covert channels in terms of undetectability and capacity. To not void the stealthiness of the channel, an important feature is the ability of restoring the carrier embedding the secret information into its original form. However, the development of such techniques mainly targets the domain of digital media steganography. Therefore, this paper applies the concept of reversible data hiding to storage network covert channels. To prove the effectiveness of our idea, a prototypical implementation of a channel exploiting IPv4 flows is presented along with its performance evaluation.
- Bernhards Blumbergs, Mauno Pihelgas, Markus Kont, Olaf Maennel, and Risto Vaarandi. 2016. Creating and detecting IPv6 transition mechanism-based information exfiltration covert channels. In Nordic Conference on Secure IT Systems. Springer, 85--100.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Krzysztof Cabaj, Luca Caviglione, Wojciech Mazurczyk, Steffen Wendzel, Alan Woodward, and Sebastian Zander. 2018. The New Threats of Information Hiding: The Road Ahead. IT Professional 20, 3 (May 2018), 31--39.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Luca Caviglione, Mauro Gaggero, Enrico Cambiaso, and Maurizio Aiello. 2017. Measuring the energy consumption of cyber security. IEEE Communications Magazine 55, 7 (2017), 58--63.Google ScholarDigital Library
- L. Caviglione, M. Podolski, W. Mazurczyk, and M. Ianigro. 2017. Covert Channels in Personal Cloud Storage Services: The Case of Dropbox. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics 13, 4 (Aug 2017), 1921--1931.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Luca Caviglione, Steffen Wendzel, and Wojciech Mazurczyk. 2017. The future of digital forensics: Challenges and the road ahead. IEEE Security & Privacy 15, 6 (2017), 12--17.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Adel El-Atawy, Qi Duan, and Ehab Al-Shaer. 2015. A novel class of robust covert channels using out-of-order packets. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing 14, 2 (2015), 116--129. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Norka B Lucena, Grzegorz Lewandowski, and Steve J Chapin. 2005. Covert channels in IPv6. In International Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies. Springer, 147--166. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bin Ma, Xiaoyu Wang, Bing Li, and Yun-Qing Shi. 2018. A Multiple Linear Regression Based High-Accuracy Error Prediction Algorithm for Reversible Data Hiding. In International Workshop on Digital Watermarking. Springer, 195--205.Google Scholar
- Wojciech Mazurczyk and Luca Caviglione. 2014. Steganography in modern smartphones and mitigation techniques. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 17, 1 (2014), 334--357.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wojciech Mazurczyk and Luca Caviglione. 2015. Information Hiding as a Challenge for Malware Detection. IEEE Security Privacy 13, 2 (Mar 2015), 89--93.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wojciech Mazurczyk, Pawel Szaga, and Krzysztof Szczypiorski. 2014. Using Transcoding for Hidden Communication in IP Telephony. Multimedia Tools Appl. 70, 3 (June 2014), 2139--2165. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wojciech Mazurczyk, Steffen Wendzel, Sebastian Zander, Amir Houmansadr, and Krzysztof Szczypiorski. 2016. Information hiding in communication networks: fundamentals, mechanisms, applications, and countermeasures. Vol. 7. John Wiley & Sons. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bo Ou, Xiaolong Li, Wei Li, and Yun-Qing Shi. 2018. Pixel-Value-Ordering Based Reversible Data Hiding with Adaptive Texture Classification and Modification. In International Workshop on Digital Watermarking. Springer, 169--179.Google Scholar
- Sabine Schmidt, Wojciech Mazurczyk, Radoslaw Kulesza, Jörg Keller, and Luca Caviglione. 2018. Exploiting IP telephony with silence suppression for hidden data transfers. Computers & Security 79 (2018), 17--32.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Chang Song, Yifeng Zhang, and Guojun Lu. 2018. Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Images Based on Image Partition and Spatial Correlation. In International Workshop on Digital Watermarking. Springer, 180--194.Google Scholar
- Steffen Wendzel and Jörg Keller. 2011. Low-attention forwarding for mobile network covert channels. In Proc. Communications and Multimedia Security (CMS 2011) (LNCS), Vol. 7025. Springer, 122--133. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Steffen Wendzel, Wojciech Mazurczyk, Luca Caviglione, and Michael Meier. 2014. Hidden and Uncontrolled -- On the Emergence of Network Steganographic Threats. In ISSE 2014 Securing Electronic Business Processes, Helmut Reimer, Norbert Pohlmann, and Wolfgang Schneider (Eds.). Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, 123--133.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Steffen Wendzel, Sebastian Zander, Bernhard Fechner, and Christian Herdin. 2015. Pattern-based Survey and Categorization of Network Covert Channel Techniques. Computing Surveys 47, 3 (2015). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sebastian Zander, Grenville Armitage, and Philip Branch. 2007. An empirical evaluation of IP Time To Live covert channels. In 2007 15th IEEE International Conference on Networks. IEEE, 42--47.Google ScholarCross Ref
Index Terms
- Towards Reversible Storage Network Covert Channels
Recommendations
A Revised Taxonomy of Steganography Embedding Patterns
ARES '21: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and SecuritySteganography embraces several hiding techniques which spawn across multiple domains. However, the related terminology is not unified among the different domains, such as digital media steganography, text steganography, cyber-physical systems ...
Design and performance evaluation of reversible network covert channels
ARES '20: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and SecurityCovert channels nested within network traffic are important tools for allowing malware to act unnoticed or to stealthily exchange and exfiltrate information. Thus, understanding how to detect or mitigate their utilization is of paramount importance, ...
Authenticable reversible data hiding scheme with less distortion in dual stego-images
In reversible data hiding, dual image-based data hiding methods are recently proposed, in which two stego-images are generated after embedding the secret data. In this paper, a new reversible data hiding method is proposed to provide less distortion and ...
Comments