Capacity boost with data security in Network Protocol Covert Channel

Abstract

Covert channels leaks information where information travels unnoticed i.e. the communication itself is hidden. Encryption used to protect the communication   from being decoded by unauthorized users. But covert channels hide the existence of communication. Covert channels are serious security threat. There are many existing techniques available for development of covert channels by manipulating certain fields in the network protocols such as HTTP, IP, TCP, etc. The available packet length based covert channels are having tamper resistance capability but due to abnormal traffic distribution results in detection possibility. In this paper we present packet length based covert channel by using real time packet lengths where statistical detection of the covert channels is not possible due to random transformations and computations used in the algorithm. Also we improved the covert data capacity and security by applying certain encryption algorithm which doesn't change the length of the original data load compared to other available techniques. We focused on implementation details and try to find out the future expansion.

Keywords: Covert channels, packet length, high bandwidth, network protocols, packet payload, computer network