Traceroute based IP channel for sending hidden short messages

Authors:
Zouheir Trabelsi;Hesham El-Sayed;Lilia Frikha;Tamer Rabie
Affiliations:
College of Information Technology, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates;College of Information Technology, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates;College of Telecommunications (SupCom), The University of Tunisia, Cité Technologique des Communications, El Ghazala, Ariana, Tunisia;College of Information Technology, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates
Venue:
IWSEC'06 Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Security
Year:
2006

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Abstract

The paper proposes a novel IP channel for sending hidden short messages, based mainly on the use of the “traceroute” command and the IP header Record route options. Instead of encrypting a hidden message or embedding it into a multimedia object, as in traditional multimedia steganography, we process the entire message and generate several IP packets with different types to carry the secret message. Thereby we foil an eavesdropper who is primarily applying statistical tests to detect encrypted communication channels. We show that our approach provides more protection against Steganalysis and sniffing attacks. A friendly graphical tool has been implemented to demonstrate the proposed secret IP channel.