Storage Covert Channel Research Articles

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

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.

A dynamic timing-storage covert channel in vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) enables high speed vehicles to communicate with each other. This kind of communication can provide road safety and passengers’ comfort. Covert channels are used to transmit information secretly over the network. Network covert channel is not only used as a hacking tool, but also used to convey secret information such as private keys. Unlike wired and conventional wireless networks, few studies are conducted on covert communication in VANET. The goal of this paper is to develop a hybrid (timing and storage) covert channel in VANET. In the timing part, covert messages are sent by altering the timing pattern of the service and control packets. The proposed covert timing algorithm is dynamically changed based on the vehicular traffic volume in the transmitter’s radio range. This dynamism is used to achieve better covert capacity with an acceptable error rate. On the other hand, some fields of the periodic status messages, sent in the control channel, are utilized in the storage part. An encoding algorithm is also proposed to embed the covert data in the mentioned covert timing and storage opportunities. The encoding algorithm provides a high embedding capacity, even if the number of opportunities’ possible values is not any power of two. Finally, the transmitted secret data volume, the packet loss ratio, the channel error rate and the effect of the proposed method on other vehicles’ throughput are evaluated in a simulation process.

The Advanced Port-in-Use Covert Channel Attack

Covert channels can be used to transfer confidential information in multilevel secure operating systems. In this article authors will discuss an improvement of our technique of transferring data using covert channels.To achieve the maximum ”top-down” data transfer rate authors presented synchronization and cooperation of two processes using the Linux task scheduler feature, proof-of-concept of explit were presented as well. In this article, authors will study the throughput of well-known covert communication channels on various modern multi-core processors under the Linux operating system - network port binding and file lock.Authors implement and analyze various methods of channel throughput increasing for different processors and different Linux-based operating systems. Optimization technique described in this paper allows to achieve more than 2 million bits per second using storage covert channel which appears a real threat to multilevel systems security where even more than 100 bits per second is considered unacceptable.

Information transfer model of virtual machine based on storage covert channel

Aiming at the problem that virtual machine information cannot be extracted incompletely, we extend the typical information extraction model of virtual machine and propose a perception mechanism in virtualization system based on storage covert channel to overcome the affection of the semantic gap. Taking advantage of undetectability of the covert channel, a secure channel is established between Guest and virtual machine monitor to pass data directly. The Guest machine can pass the control information of malicious process to virtual machine monitor by using the VMCALL instruction and shared memory. By parsing critical information in process control structure, virtual machine monitor can terminate the malicious processes. The test results show that the proposed mechanism can clear the user-level malicious programs in the virtual machine effectively and covertly. Meanwhile, its performance overhead is about the same as that of other mainstream monitoring mode.