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Journal Article
Practical covert wireless unidirectional communication in IEEE 802.11 environment
- Authors
- Hayoung Seong, Ikkyun Kim, Yongsung Jeon, Mi-Kyung Oh, Sangjae Lee, Dooho Choi
- Issue Date
- 2023-01
- Citation
- IEEE Internet of Things Journal, v.10, no.2, pp.1499-1516
- ISSN
- 2327-4662
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Language
- English
- Type
- Journal Article
- Abstract
- Covert communications, or covert channels, are commonly exploited to establish a data exfiltration channel from an insider on a trusted network to a malicious receiver outside the network without using normal communication of the network. It is because the malicious receiver is an unauthorized user of the communication network and so he cannot communicate with any entity in the network. In this study, we construct a new covert wireless unidirectional communication mechanism in an IEEE 802.11 environment. Our covert communication is based on a covert timing channel exploiting the beacon interval of a given commercial-like AP. Because the wireless covert channel we proposed can be implemented only with firmware modification to the WLAN MAC protocol, it is very suitable for application in a real public AP environment. In order to dramatically reduce the chance of covert signals being detected by others, a new and simple covert data encoding scheme, called ping-pong covert timing channel (PPCTC), is proposed, and we show that the covertness of the PPCTC is excellent compared to the previous timing-based covert channels. Although this wireless covert communication is unidirectional communication, since PPCTC has recovery characteristics against consecutive 2-bit errors, stable communication is guaranteed. Furthermore, a covert frame structure is presented for providing the confidentiality and integrity of the information transmitted via our covert channel. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt.
- KSP Keywords
- Beacon Interval(BI), Communication Mechanism, Covert Channel, Covert Communication, Covert Data, Covert timing channel(CTC), Data Encoding, Data exfiltration, Frame structure, IEEE 802.11, Ping-pong
This work is distributed under the term of Korea Open Government License (KOGL)
(Type 4: : Type 1 + Commercial Use Prohibition+Change Prohibition)
(Type 4: : Type 1 + Commercial Use Prohibition+Change Prohibition)
