Hidden and Uncontrolled - On the Emergence of Network Steganographic Threats

Network steganography is the art of hiding secret information within innocent network transmissions. Recent findings indicate that novel malware is increasingly using network steganography. Similarly, other malicious activities can profit from network steganography, such as data leakage or the exchange of pedophile data. This paper provides an introduction to network steganography and highlights its potential application for harmful purposes. We discuss the issues related to countering network steganography in practice and provide an outlook on further research directions and problems.Comment: 11 page

Unified Description for Network Information Hiding Methods

Until now hiding methods in network steganography have been described in arbitrary ways, making them difficult to compare. For instance, some publications describe classical channel characteristics, such as robustness and bandwidth, while others describe the embedding of hidden information. We introduce the first unified description of hiding methods in network steganography. Our description method is based on a comprehensive analysis of the existing publications in the domain. When our description method is applied by the research community, future publications will be easier to categorize, compare and extend. Our method can also serve as a basis to evaluate the novelty of hiding methods proposed in the future.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, 1 table; currently under revie

JPEG steganography with particle swarm optimization accelerated by AVX

Digital steganography aims at hiding secret messages in digital data transmitted over insecure channels. The JPEG format is prevalent in digital communication, and images are often used as cover objects in digital steganography. Optimization methods can improve the properties of images with embedded secret but introduce additional computational complexity to their processing. AVX instructions available in modern CPUs are, in this work, used to accelerate data parallel operations that are part of image steganography with advanced optimizations.Web of Science328art. no. e544

Blindspot: Indistinguishable Anonymous Communications

Communication anonymity is a key requirement for individuals under targeted surveillance. Practical anonymous communications also require indistinguishability - an adversary should be unable to distinguish between anonymised and non-anonymised traffic for a given user. We propose Blindspot, a design for high-latency anonymous communications that offers indistinguishability and unobservability under a (qualified) global active adversary. Blindspot creates anonymous routes between sender-receiver pairs by subliminally encoding messages within the pre-existing communication behaviour of users within a social network. Specifically, the organic image sharing behaviour of users. Thus channel bandwidth depends on the intensity of image sharing behaviour of users along a route. A major challenge we successfully overcome is that routing must be accomplished in the face of significant restrictions - channel bandwidth is stochastic. We show that conventional social network routing strategies do not work. To solve this problem, we propose a novel routing algorithm. We evaluate Blindspot using a real-world dataset. We find that it delivers reasonable results for applications requiring low-volume unobservable communication.Comment: 13 Page

Security of Streaming Media Communications with Logistic Map and Self-Adaptive Detection-Based Steganography

Voice over IP (VoIP) is finding its way into several applications, but its security concerns still remain. This paper shows how a new self-adaptive steganographic method can ensure the security of covert VoIP communications over the Internet. In this study an Active Voice Period Detection algorithm is devised for PCM codec to detect whether a VoIP packet carries active or inactive voice data, and the data embedding location in a VoIP stream is chosen randomly according to random sequences generated from a logistic chaotic map. The initial parameters of the chaotic map and the selection of where to embed the message are negotiated between the communicating parties. Steganography experiments on active and inactive voice periods were carried out using a VoIP communications system. Performance evaluation and security analysis indicates that the proposed VoIP steganographic scheme can withstand statistical detection, and achieve secure real-time covert communications with high speech quality and negligible signal distortion