A Reliable Covert Channel for Stealthy Data Transmission for Internet-of-Underwater-Things

Abstract

The Internet-of-Underwater-Things (IoUTs) assembles underwater devices to be connected to each other in a wide range of applications, and it has become an important security issue to guarantee data privacy during IoUTs data transmission. To mitigate the data transmission security under the IoUTs environment, in this article, a payload-dependent parallel-distributed covert storage channel scheme for IoUTs is introduced, which is realized by selecting the normal data flow as the carrier and discretizing the data transmission to ensure that the data will not be simply extracted and restored. At the same time, the scheme introduces bidirectional redundant encoding to ensure the data integrity and prevent the adversary from tampering with the data. The payload-dependent parallel-distributed storage covert channel introduced in this article realizes secure data transmission of IoUTs, which is based on ensuring the robustness and achieves a transmission rate of effective coding rate for different carriers. The scheme's performance is discussed in the aspects of undetectability, robustness and throughput, and it is proven that the scheme is of practical application.