Hidden and Uncontrolled – On the Emergence of Network Steganographic Threats

Wendzel, Steffen; Mazurczyk, Wojciech; Caviglione, Luca; Meier, Michael

doi:10.1007/978-3-658-06708-3_9

Cited by 24 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…II. RELATED WORK The application of steganography to design covert wireless communication systems has received some attention over the last few years [13][14][15][16][17]. However, only few works have focused on the design of general-purpose, efficient and undetectable covert wireless communication systems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hiding Data in Plain Sight: Undetectable Wireless Communications Through Pseudo-Noise Asymmetric Shift Keying

DrOro

Restuccia

Melodia

2019

IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications

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Undetectable wireless transmissions are fundamental to avoid eavesdroppers or censorship by authoritarian governments. To address this issue, wireless steganography "hides" covert information inside primary information by slightly modifying the transmitted waveform such that primary information will still be decodable, while covert information will be seen as noise by agnostic receivers. Since the addition of covert information inevitably decreases the SNR of the primary transmission, a key challenge in wireless steganography is to mathematically analyze and optimize the impact of the covert channel on the primary channel as a function of different channel conditions. Another core issue is to make sure that the covert channel is almost undetectable by eavesdroppers. Existing approaches are protocol-specific and thus their performance cannot be assessed and optimized in general scenarios. To address this research gap, we notice that existing wireless technologies rely on phase-keying modulations (e.g., BPSK, QPSK) that in most cases do not use the channel up to its Shannon capacity. Therefore, the residual capacity can be leveraged to implement a wireless system based on a pseudo-noise asymmetric shift keying (PN-ASK) modulation, where covert symbols are mapped by shifting the amplitude of primary symbols. This way, covert information will be undetectable, since a receiver expecting phase-modulated symbols will see their shift in amplitude as an effect of channel/path loss degradation. Through rigorous mathematical analysis, we first investigate the SER of PN-ASK as a function of the channel; then, we find the optimal PN-ASK parameters that optimize primary and covert throughput under different channel condition. We evaluate the throughput performance and undetectability of PN-ASK through extensive simulations and on an experimental testbed based on USRP N210 software-defined radios. Results indicate that PN-ASK improves the throughput by more than 8x with respect to prior art. Finally, we demonstrate through experiments that PN-ASK is able to transmit covert data on top of IEEE 802.11g frames, which are correctly decoded by an off-the-shelf laptop WiFi card without any hardware modifications.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hiding Data in Plain Sight: Undetectable Wireless Communications Through Pseudo-Noise Asymmetric Shift Keying

DrOro

Restuccia

Melodia

2019

IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications

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“…Recent information hiding solutions exploit popular P2P services like Skype, P2P file sharing systems like BitTorrent, search features like Google Suggest, multimedia and real-time services like IP telephony, new network protocols like SCTP, wireless network environments and many more [2].…”

Section: Recent Developmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Likewise, the term cryptography originates from kryptos − hidden or secret and graphein [1]. Steganography and cryptography can be applied in combination; both are orthogonal [2]. Both the terms have closer meaning.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Novel Approach for Hiding Data in Videos Using Network Steganography Methods

Sekhar¹,

G²,

M³

2015

IJWMN

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Steganography is a technology used since years for the communication of messages secretly. These secret messages are put inside honest carriers. Carriers can be digital images, audio files, video files and so on. The limitation in sending concealed longer messages has been overcoming by the inclusion of video files as carriers. Popular internet services such as Skype, BitTorrent, Google Suggest, and WLANs are targets of information hiding techniques. Nowadays, plotters are not only using the carriers but also the protocols for communication that regulate the path of the carrier through the Internet. This technique is named Network Steganography.

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“…Although most of the steganographic applications aim at protecting individual privacy, some authors [3], [21], [22] fear that steganography may be used for malicious or dangerous purposes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improved Security Based on Combined Encryption and Steganography Techniques

Mocanu¹,

Duluta²,

Merezeanu³

et al. 2017

SIC

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For some people a science, for other people just an art, steganography is in fact an ancient method of embedding a message into an apparently uninteresting carrier. Aiming to protect information, steganography is considered to be a close relative of encryption although they have different approaches. While encryption scrambles the message based on a certain algorithm so it can't be understood by anyone that does not hold the unscrambling key, steganography works on hiding the message without the need to deteriorate it. Minor alteration of the carrier file is accepted since steganography does not affect its useful content. Actually, steganography exploits file redundancy, file headers or, in case of multimedia content, replaces information that can't be used or perceived by the human eyes or ears. In this paper, a combination of image based steganography with encryption is presented. The encryption and decryption are based on two different files in which, by steganographic means, important information is hidden. The original message (the secret message) can be restored only if both files arrive safe at destination. There are no constraints regarding the image file types. The most important contribution resides in how the original information is encrypted and embedded into different graphic files, sent to the destination through different channels and then restored. Comparative performance tests were performed.

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Hidden and Uncontrolled – On the Emergence of Network Steganographic Threats

Cited by 24 publications

References 23 publications

Hiding Data in Plain Sight: Undetectable Wireless Communications Through Pseudo-Noise Asymmetric Shift Keying

Hiding Data in Plain Sight: Undetectable Wireless Communications Through Pseudo-Noise Asymmetric Shift Keying

A Novel Approach for Hiding Data in Videos Using Network Steganography Methods

Improved Security Based on Combined Encryption and Steganography Techniques

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