Paper Info
Title
Hide and seek in time: robust covert timing channels
Abstract
Covert timing channels aim at transmitting hidden messages by controlling the time between transmissions of consecutive payload packets in overt network communication. Previous results used encoding mechanisms that are either easy to detect with statistical analysis, thus spoiling the purpose of a covert channel, and/or are highly sensitive to channel noise, rendering them useless in practice. In this paper, we introduce a novel covert timing channel which allows to balance undetectability and robustness: i) the encoded message is modulated in the inter-packet delay of the underlying overt communication channel such that the statistical properties of regular traffic can be closely approximated and ii) the underlying encoding employs spreading techniques to provide robustness. We experimentally validate the effectiveness of our approach by establishing covert channels over on-line gaming traffic. The experimental results show that our covert timing channel can achieve strong robustness and undetectability, by varying the data transmission rate.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1007/978-3-642-04444-1_8
ESORICS
Keywords
Field
DocType
statistical property,on-line gaming traffic,novel covert timing channel,strong robustness,underlying overt communication channel,statistical analysis,regular traffic,covert channel,covert timing channel,robust covert timing channel,overt network communication,communication channels,data transmission
Data transmission,Computer science,Computer security,Network packet,Covert channel,Communication channel,Covert,Robustness (computer science),Channel capacity,Encoding (memory)
Conference
Volume
ISSN
ISBN
5789
0302-9743
3-642-04443-3
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
49
1.70
12
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yali Liu1954.58
Dipak Ghosal22848163.40
Frederik Armknecht3100068.65
Ahmad-reza Sadeghi45463334.69
Steffen Schulz526513.52
Stefan Katzenbeisser61844143.68