Covert information transmission through the use of standard collision resolution algorithms

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the potential of the wireless medium to host covert channels. We do so by considering a simple covert channel and evaluating its performance. The channel is based on the First Come First Serve (FCFS) spliting algorithm, which is a standard collision resolution algorithm [1,2] that operates in a distributed fashion and coordinates access to a standard collision channel (possibly wireless medium or multi access cable) shared by a large number of users.