Study of the Error Detection and Correction Scheme for Distributed Network Covert Channels

Abstract

Information hiding in communication networks is gaining recently increased attention from the security community. This is because such techniques are a double-edged sword that, on the one hand, can be used, e.g., to enhance the privacy of Internet users while on the other can be utilized by malware developers to enable a covert communication feature in malicious software. This means that to understand the risks that data hiding poses, it is of utmost importance to study the inner workings of potential information hiding methods and accompanying mechanisms (e.g., those that provide reliability of such communications) as well as to develop effective and efficient countermeasures. That is why, in this paper we perform a systematic experimental evaluation of the error detection and correcting scheme, which is suitable for complex network data hiding approaches, i.e., distributed network covert channels (DNCCs). The obtained results prove that the proposed solution guarantees secret communication reliability even when faced with severe networking conditions up to 20% of data corruption while maintaining a stable covert data rate.