New: Indirect Covert Channel Patterns

In an upcoming paper by Tobias Schmidbauer and Steffen Wendzel that will be presented at ASIA CCS 2022, patterns for indirect network covert channels are proposed.

The paper entitled SoK: A Survey Of Indirect Network-level Covert Channels is already available online through this link at ResearchGate. In the future, it should be also available through its DOI: 10.1145/3488932.3517418.

Abstract: Within the last few years, indirect network-level covert channels have experienced a renaissance with new ideas and evolving concepts. Logical network separation may now be crossed and the sending and receiving activities can be performed with temporal distance between sending and receiving operations. Despite these new developments, all indirect network covert channels share certain basic principles that allow a categorization. So far, the concepts of indirect network-level covert channels have never been systematized. In this paper, we introduce a taxonomy containing indirect covert channel patterns that allow a differentiated analysis of all known indirect network-level covert channels. We introduce additional definitions to unify the understanding of the domain and further identify crucial features of indirect covert channels to make them comparable and describable. We further discuss application scenarios as well as potential and already evaluated countermeasures against indirect covert channels. Further, we discuss observable trends and anticipated future developments in the research area of indirect network-level covert channels.