Password authentication with insecure communication
Communications of the ACM
A note on the confinement problem
Communications of the ACM
A rate-adaptive MAC protocol for multi-Hop wireless networks
Proceedings of the 7th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
IEEE 802.11 rate adaptation: a practical approach
MSWiM '04 Proceedings of the 7th ACM international symposium on Modeling, analysis and simulation of wireless and mobile systems
Web tap: detecting covert web traffic
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Profiling internet backbone traffic: behavior models and applications
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Improved Port Knocking with Strong Authentication
ACSAC '05 Proceedings of the 21st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
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MM&Sec '06 Proceedings of the 8th workshop on Multimedia and security
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SRUTI'05 Proceedings of the Steps to Reducing Unwanted Traffic on the Internet on Steps to Reducing Unwanted Traffic on the Internet Workshop
Covert channels in privacy-preserving identification systems
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Anti-jamming timing channels for wireless networks
WiSec '08 Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Wireless network security
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SS'07 Proceedings of 16th USENIX Security Symposium on USENIX Security Symposium
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SP '08 Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
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Authentication in 802.11 LANs using a covert side channel
ICC'09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE international conference on Communications
A realistic implementation for simulating side-channel in mobile ad hoc networks
Proceedings of the Military Modeling & Simulation Symposium
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For extremely sensitive applications, it may be advantageous for users to transmit certain types of data covertly over the network. This provides an additional layer of security to that provided by the different layers of the protocol stack. In this paper we present a covert side channel that uses the 802.11 MAC rate switching protocol. The covert channel provides a general method to hide communications within currently deployed 802.11 LANs. The technique uses a one-time password (OTP) algorithm to ensure high-entropy randomness of the covert messages. We investigate how the covert side channel affects network throughput under various rate-switching conditions with UDP-based and TCP-based application traffic. We also investigate the covertness of the covert side channel using standardized entropy. The theoretical analysis shows that the maximum covert channel bandwidth is 60 bps. The simulation results show that the impact on network throughput is minimal and increases slightly as the covert channel bandwidth increases. We further show that the channel has 100% accuracy with minimal impact on rate switching entropy for scenarios where rate switching normally occurs. Finally, we present two applications for the covert channel: covert authentication and covert WiFi botnets. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.