Freitag, 19. August 2016

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.