The creation of covert channels in public computer networks can prove an effective means of information hiding and secret communication. With the widespread adoption of the Internet the TCP/IP suite of protocols have become pervasive, and therefore an attractive target for covert channel exploitation. This paper gives a brief overview of covert channels in communication networks, and presents a...

Over last two decades, side and covert channel research has shown variety of ways of exfiltrating information for a computer system. Processor microarchitectural side and covert channel attacks have emerged as some of the most clever attacks, and ones which are difficult to deal with, without impacting system performance. Unlike electromagnetic or power-based channels, microarchitectural side a...

With the emergence of computers in every day activities and with the ever-growing complexity of networks and network communication protocols, covert channels are becoming an eminent threat to the confidentiality of information. In light of this threat, we propose a technique to detect confidential information leakage via covert channels. Although several works examine covert channel detection a...

Web traffic accounts for more than half of Internet traffic today. Camouflaging covert timing channels in Web traffic would be advantageous for concealment. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of disguising network covert timing channels as HTTP traffic to avoid detection. Extensive research has shown that Internet traffic, including HTTP traffic, exhibits self-similarity and long ran...

We present in this paper a new network storage channel WebShare that uses the plentiful, public Web counters for storage. Therefore, the physical locations of the WebShare encoder and decoder are not restricted to a single path. To make WebShare practical, we have addressed a number of thorny issues, such as the “noise” introduced by other legitimate Web requests, and synchronization between en...

Network covert timing channels embed secret messages in legitimate packets by modulating interpacket delays. Unfortunately, such channels are normally implemented in higher network layers (layer 3 or above) and easily detected or prevented. However, access to the physical layer of a network stack allows for timing channels that are virtually invisible: Sub-microsecond modulations that are undet...

Open-audit election protocols have, in recent years, focused on the ballot casting process, where the difficulty lies in proving to the unaided voter that the encrypted ballot faithfully captures her intent. We present MarkPledge2, an evolution of Neff’s MarkPledge scheme and the first efficient, covert-channel-resistant, receipt-free ballot casting scheme that can be used by humans without tru...

The light-emitting diode(LED) is widely used as an indicator on the information device. Early in 2002, Loughry et al studied the exfiltration of LED indicators[16] and found the kind of LEDs unmodulated to indicate some state of the device can hardly be utilized to establish covert channels. In our paper, a novel approach is proposed to modulate this kind of LEDs. We use binary frequency shift ...

This study experimentally tested the immediate effect of thin ideal media exposure on food intake of overt and covert narcissistic (pre-)adolescent girls (8-15 years old). A between subject design was used in which the girls (N = 400) participated in a taste test after watching a slideshow of thin, average or plus size models. No differences on food intake between the exposure conditions were f...

Contemporary storage-based information hiding methods support plausible deniability by embedding encrypted information among bulk random content. Since the presence of random data is easily detected, these schemes facilitate plausible deniability by enabling disclosure of less sensitive information whilst concealing the existance of some other information. We propose a covert channel on storage...