Leveraging a Music Streaming Platform in Establishing a Novel Storage Covert Channel

Abstract

Covert communication enables the hidden transfer of data. Unlike encrypted communication, where the goal is to make the transmitted data unreadable, covert communication aims to hide the existence of the communication. There have been research efforts on developing and preventing numerous types of channels. We present a novel storage covert channel by leveraging a music streaming platform and take an in depth look into its inner workings. The channel aims to enable data transmission between one sender and multiple receivers. The channel, presented in two different methods of encoding, utilizes a public music streaming platform playlists and encodes data by selectively adding music tracks. The first method of encoding leverages song names while the second uses data embedded within the song track id. We were successful in implementing both encoding schemes, thus demonstrating the covert channels’ feasibility.