Yesterday, I received the notification of acceptance for our latest paper Systemaic Engineering of Control Protocols for Covert Channels at the 13th IFIP Communications and Multimedia Security in Kent, GB.
S. Wendzel and J. Keller: Systemaic Engineering of Control Protocols for Covert Channels, 13th CMS 2012 (to appear).
Within the last years, new techniques for network covert channels arose, such as covert channel overlay networking, protocol switching covert channels, and adaptive covert channels. These techniques have in common that they rely on covert channel-internal control protocols (so called micro protocols) placed within the hidden bits of a covert channel's payload. An adaptable approach for the engineering of such micro protocols is not available.
This paper introduces a protocol engineering technique for micro protocols. We present a two-layer system comprising six steps to create a micro protocol design. The approach tries to combine different goals: (1) simplicity, (2) ensuring a standard-conform behaviour of the underlying protocol if the micro protocol is used within a binary protocol header, as well as we provide an optimization technique to (3) raise as few attention as possible. We apply a context-free grammar to analyze the micro protocol's behavior within the context of the underlying network protocol.
Keywords: Network Covert Channel, Covert Channel Control Protocol