CCEAP 0.5.0 released!

The Covert Channel Education tool CCEAP was released in v.0.5.0 today, including support for two new hiding patterns: `Inter-arrival Time' and 'Rate/Throughput'.

CCEAP will be presented during a poster presentation at ACM CCS in Vienna next week.

• Download: 
• You can already download our CCS conference poster (PDF).
• Update: You can now also download the paper.
• Changelog of CCEAP v. 0.5.0

New Publication: An Educational Network Protocol for Covert Channel Analysis Using Patterns

A new short paper (poster) on pattern-based information hiding was accepted at this year's ACM CCS conference in Vienna, Austria:

Steffen Wendzel and Wojciech Mazurczyk: POSTER: An Educational Network Protocol for Covert Channel Analysis Using Patterns, in Proc. 23rd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2016), 2016.

Abstract: The utilization of information hiding is on the rise among cybercriminals, e.g. to cloak the communication of malicious software as well as by ordinary users for privacy-enhancing purposes. A recent trend is to use network traffic in form of covert channels to convey secrets. In result, security expert training is incomplete if these aspects are not covered.
This paper fills this gap by providing a method for teaching covert channel analysis of network protocols. We define a sample protocol called Covert Channel Educational Analysis Protocol (CCEAP) that can be used in didactic environments. In addition, compared to previous works we lower the barrier for understanding network covert channels by eliminating the requirement for students to understand several network protocols in advance.

Keywords: Covert Channels; Steganography; Information Hiding

Please find more information about CCEAP on the project's website.

CCEAP – a tool for pattern-based covert channel education

Teaching network information hiding is considered a challenging task. Students must first master network protocols, followed by the basics of information security, and finally steganography in networks.

After developing a new tool called CCEAP (Covert Channel Educational Analysis Protocol), we now released a first version of it and experiment with the tool in university education.

CCEAP is a protocol that is vulnerable against several covert channels and that eliminates the need to teach several other network protocols in advance (and to switch between them) just to explain network information hiding fundamentals.

New Book Covering Information Hiding Patterns

It is our pleasure to announce our new book that was released this month. The title Information Hiding in Communication Networks by W. Mazurcuyk, S. Wendzel, S. Zander, A. Houmansadr and K. Szczypiorski covers one chapter (#3) that is basically structured by the hiding patterns you find on this website but adds a few additional ones. In addition, the book introduces a novel terminology for network information hiding.