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IP covert timing channels: design and detection

Published: 25 October 2004 Publication History

Abstract

A network covert channel is a mechanism that can be used to leak information across a network in violation of a security policy and in a manner that can be difficult to detect. In this paper, we describe our implementation of a covert network timing channel, discuss the subtle issues that arose in its design, and present performance data for the channel. We then use our implementation as the basis for our experiments in its detection. We show that the regularity of a timing channel can be used to differentiate it from other traffic and present two methods of doing so and measures of their efficiency. We also investigate mechanisms that attackers might use to disrupt the regularity of the timing channel, and demonstrate methods of detection that are effective against them.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CCS '04: Proceedings of the 11th ACM conference on Computer and communications security
October 2004
376 pages
ISBN:1581139616
DOI:10.1145/1030083
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 25 October 2004

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Author Tags

  1. TCP/IP
  2. covert timing channels
  3. detection
  4. network covert channels

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Cited By

View all
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  • (2024)Investigating HTTP Covert Channels Through Fuzz TestingProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security10.1145/3664476.3664493(1-9)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Graph-Based Covert Transaction Detection and Protection in BlockchainIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security10.1109/TIFS.2023.334789519(2244-2257)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)A Side-Channel Analysis of Sensor Multiplexing for Covert Channels and Application Profiling on Mobile DevicesIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing10.1109/TDSC.2023.332373221:4(3141-3152)Online publication date: Jul-2024
  • (2024)A Robust Covert Channel With Self-Bit Recovery for IEEE 802.11 NetworksIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2024.339857911:16(27356-27368)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2024
  • (2024)A message verification scheme based on physical layer-enabled data hiding for flying ad hoc networkMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-024-18342-583:32(77165-77185)Online publication date: 23-Feb-2024
  • (2024)Learning autoencoder ensembles for detecting malware hidden communications in IoT ecosystemsJournal of Intelligent Information Systems10.1007/s10844-023-00819-862:4(925-949)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2024
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  • (2024)Gaming the system: tetromino-based covert channel and its impact on mobile securityInternational Journal of Information Security10.1007/s10207-024-00875-323:4(3007-3027)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Performance Improvements of Covert Timing Channel Detection in the Era of Artificial IntelligenceAdvances in Distributed Computing and Machine Learning10.1007/978-981-97-1841-2_30(399-410)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2024
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