An end-to-end covert channel via packet dropout for mobile networks

Abstract

Voice over Long-Term Evolution enables reliable transmission among enormous Internet of Things devices, by providing end-to-end quality of service for Internet protocol-based services such as audio, video, and multimedia messaging. The research of covert timing channels aims at transmitting covert message stealthily to the receiver using variations of timing behavior. Existing approaches mainly modulate the covert message into inter-packet delays of overt traffic, which are not suitable for Voice over Long-Term Evolution, since most of the inter-packet delays of Voice over Long-Term Evolution traffic are of regular distribution, and any modification on inter-packet delays is easy to be detected. To address the issue, in this work, we propose a novel covert timing channel for the video stream in Voice over Long-Term Evolution, which modulates the covert message by deliberately dropping out video packets. Based on the twodimensional mapping matrix, the blocks of covert message are mapped into dropout-packet sequence numbers. To recover the covert message, the receiver retrieves the sequence numbers of lost packets and identifies them to be translated into blocks of the covert message. To evaluate our scheme, the simulations with different packet loss rates are conducted to validate the undetectability, throughput, and robustness, finally, the results show that this scheme is effective and reliable.

A robust packet‐dropping covert channel for mobile intelligent terminals

“…Houmansadr et al 64 described the CoCo scheme, which was designed with a robust coding algorithm, and the covert messages was embedded into inter‐packet delays. Tan et al 21 proposed a covert channel over VoLTE via packet dropout, and robustness was guaranteed by additional packet dropouts.…”

“…Since packet payloads of VoLTE traffic are not encrypted during the currently implemented transmission, building a covert timing channel over VoLTE is a viable and practical solution. Inspired by the features of packet dropouts, 21,22 we propose a novel VoLTE covert timing channel scheme that is constructed by dropping packets with specific sequence numbers. More specifically, the encrypted covert message is first subdivided into fixed-length message blocks.…”

Group Key Agreement Protocol Based on Privacy Protection and Attribute Authentication

“…An efficient one round certificateless authenticated group key agreement protocol is proposed in [49], [50], it satisfies the security demand of mobile Ad Hoc networks. The protocol has achieved appropriate optimization to improve the performance of Ad Hoc networks in terms of frequent communication interruptions and reconnections.…”

A Multimodality Information Synchronization Scheme for a Multisource Information System in the Electric Grid

“…erefore, the new technique of database synchronization between isolated networks is worth further study. e general network isolation scheme is implemented by installing a network isolation device between trusted intranet and nontrusted internet [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. e principle is based on the idea of access control and physical isolation and defines relevant constraints and rules to guarantee the security strength of the network.…”