Title
Practical covert channels for WiFi systems
Abstract
Wireless covert channels promise to exfiltrate information with high bandwidth by circumventing traditional access control mechanisms. Ideally, they are only accessible by the intended recipient and-for regular system users/operators-indistinguishable from normal operation. While a number of theoretical and simulation studies exist in literature, the practical aspects of WiFi covert channels are not well understood. Yet, it is particularly the practical design and implementation aspect of wireless systems that provides attackers with the latitude to establish covert channels: the ability to operate under adverse conditions and to tolerate a high amount of signal variations. Moreover, covert physical receivers do not have to be addressed within wireless frames, but can simply eavesdrop on the transmission. In this work, we analyze the possibilities to establish covert channels in WiFi systems with emphasis on exploiting physical layer characteristics. We discuss design alternatives for selected covert channel approaches and study their feasibility in practice. By means of an extensive performance analysis, we compare the covert channel bandwidth. We further evaluate the possibility of revealing the introduced covert channels based on different detection capabilities.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/CNS.2015.7346830
2015 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Wi-Fi system,wireless covert channel,access control mechanism,physical layer characteristics
Wireless,Computer security,Computer science,Covert channel,Covert,Computer network,Adverse conditions,Bandwidth (signal processing),Physical layer,Access control,High bandwidth
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
abs/1505.01081
2474-025X
4
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.44
14
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jiska Classen1339.10
Matthias Schulz211112.74
Matthias Hollick375097.29