Cryptography and Network Security: Principles and Practice
Cryptography and Network Security: Principles and Practice
Hiding Data in the OSI Network Model
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Information Hiding
Eliminating Steganography in Internet Traffic with Active Wardens
IH '02 Revised Papers from the 5th International Workshop on Information Hiding
CARDIS '98 Proceedings of the The International Conference on Smart Card Research and Applications
Protocol scrubbing: network security through transparent flow modification
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
IP covert timing channels: design and detection
Proceedings of the 11th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON) - Special issue on networking and information theory
Taking advantages of a disadvantage: Digital forensics and steganography using document metadata
Journal of Systems and Software
Network intrusion detection: evasion, traffic normalization, and end-to-end protocol semantics
SSYM'01 Proceedings of the 10th conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 10
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering - Special issue on computer security and privacy
Security and privacy issues in the Portable Document Format
Journal of Systems and Software
E-mail-Based Covert Channels for Asynchronous Message Steganography
IMIS '11 Proceedings of the 2011 Fifth International Conference on Innovative Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing
New proofs for NMAC and HMAC: security without collision-resistance
CRYPTO'06 Proceedings of the 26th annual international conference on Advances in Cryptology
A recursive approach to low complexity codes
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
CSP-Based general detection model of network covert storage channels
ICT-EurAsia'13 Proceedings of the 2013 international conference on Information and Communication Technology
Communications of the ACM
A botnet-based command and control approach relying on swarm intelligence
Journal of Network and Computer Applications
Improving energy efficiency in distributed intrusion detection systems
Journal of High Speed Networks
Hi-index | 0.10 |
Current Internet e-mail facilities are built onto the foundation of standard rules and protocols, which usually allow a considerable amount of ''freedom'' to their designers. Each of these standards has been defined based on a number of vendor specific implementations, in order to provide common inter-working procedures for cross-vendor communication. Thus, a lot of optional and redundant information is being exchanged during e-mail sessions, which is available to implement versatile covert channel mechanisms. This work exploits this possibility by presenting a simple but effective steganographic scheme that can be used to deploy robust secret communication through spam e-mails. This scheme can offer unidirectional asynchronous one-to-one or one-to-many covert channel facilities that are able to bypass the most sophisticated firewalls and traffic analyzers. Its implementation neither affects the involved transport protocols nor causes any perceivable performance degradation or data loss to the end-users. The proposed scheme allows one to manage possible filtering/loss of the e-mails being the vehicle of the secret information. A novel retransmission method based on the Raptor codes has been adopted. The use of Raptor codes is key to correctly and efficiently manage the difficulty or impossibility to retransmit e-mails in the case of a unidirectional secret communication starting from one sender and directed to many recipients. In order to evaluate the performance characteristics of the proposed scheme, an empirical estimation of the covert channel bandwidth has been performed.