Fostering secure cross-layer collaborative communications by means of covert channels in MEC environments

Abstract

Recently, due to unexpected conditions introduced by the COVID-19 outbreak, collaborative tools are widely adopted in almost all sectors of our daily lifestyle. Almost all tools rely mainly on the World Wide Web technologies that, in turn, are built upon the HTTP protocol. The HTTP protocol is considered as the “bricks” of all kind of communications among people/devices that exchange messages with different purposes and meanings. Unfortunately, it is widely used to track and monitor people when using the Internet. This paper exploits the HTTP protocol and try to reverse this negative aspect by designing and implementing a way to help users (and devices) to not disclose too much information when collaborating each other even in an unfriendly environment. A novel steganographic protocol is proposed by using the HTTP “control” messages. The proposed protocol can be easily adopted by devices communicating in a MEC (Mobile Edge Computing) environment where it is important to guarantee the integrity and the confidentiality of all communications, especially messages that give “instructions” to devices or in device-to-device communications. The proposed protocol allows to avoid using complex and computationally demanding cryptographic protocols that are very difficult to be used in devices with limited resources.