Behavioral mimicry covert communication

Abstract

In this paper, the use of structural behavior of communication protocols (e.g., CSMA) in designing new covert channels is investigated. In this way, the covert transmitter adopts the communication protocol architecture to control its overt traffic flow yet with different parameters that give it enough freedom to embed the covert message in its overt traffic. A salient feature of this scheme is that its rate increases in proportion with the overt capacity of the system. In addition, the paper presents a new covert channel for the wireless environment that mimics the structural behavior of CSMA protocol. The parameters of the proposed scheme are optimized in order to maximize the channel rate, stealthiness and robustness. Finally, the performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed from security, reliability and communication rate point of view. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.