A balanced approach to eliminate packet length-based covert channels

Elsadig, Muawia A.; Fadlalla, Yahia A.

doi:10.1109/icetas.2017.8277839

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…A communication channel used to leak confidential information in a manner that is against security policy of a system is known as a covert channel. It is a highly hazardous, undetectable, persistent, and evolving threat that eludes detection technologies and presents a real challenge [11]. The idea of a covert channel was initially presented by Lampson [12].…”

Section: Type Of Covert Channelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Network Covert channels

Elsadig

2024

Steganography - The Art of Hiding Information [Working Title]

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With the rapid advancement of communication and computer network technologies, covert channels are now more secure, quicker to set up, harder to detect, and easier to design than ever before. By breaking a system security policy, a covert channel can be utilized to leak confidential communications. Undoubtedly, one of the most difficult challenges is still detecting such harmful, unobservable, and covert dangers. Due to the fact that this danger takes advantage of techniques not intended for communication, it is invisible to conventional security solutions. This chapter offers a concise overview of covert channel concept, techniques, classifications, and countermeasures, emphasizing how new technologies are vulnerable to being exploited for initiation of different covert channels and how they offer a rich environment for developing effective but challenging covert channel attacks. It gives a comprehensive review of common covert channel countermeasures with more focus on machine learning detection techniques. Although some research studies have revealed beneficial uses of covert channel, which is natural given that many approaches have a double-edged sword impact, this chapter focuses on covert channels as a security threat that compromise our data and networks.

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Section: Type Of Covert Channelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hackers and steganographers have been inspired to create various network covert channel scenarios by the quick evolution of network protocols and methods. This has led to the development of several network-based covert channel approaches [17].…”

Section: Network Covert Channel Classificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Network Covert channels

Elsadig

2024

Steganography - The Art of Hiding Information [Working Title]

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“…Covert channels are mainly divided into two types: storage covert channels (SCC) and timing covert channels (TCT) [15]. In storage channels, storage location is used to hold a covert message [16] such as protocol fields, whereas in timing channels, a covert message is modulated using the timing characteristics of the network traffic. In other words, covert storage channels use an object to send a covert message while covert timing channels use timing aspects to convey covert messages.…”

Section: Covert Channel Typesmentioning

confidence: 99%

An ensemble model to detect packet length covert channels

Elsadig

Gafar

2023

IJECE

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<span lang="EN-US">Covert channel techniques have enriched the way to commit dangerous and unwatched attacks. They exploit ways that are not intended to convey information; therefore, traditional security measures cannot detect them. One class of covert channels that difficult to detect, mitigate, or eliminate is packet length covert channels. This class of covert channels takes advantage of packet length variations to convey covert information. Numerous research articles reflect the useful use of machine learning (ML) classification approaches to discover covert channels. Therefore, this study presented an efficient ensemble classification model to detect such types of attacks. The ensemble model consists of five machine learning algorithms representing the base classifiers. The base classifiers include naive Bayes (NB), decision tree (DT), support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), and random forest (RF). Whereas, the logistic regression (LR) classifier was employed to aggregate the outputs of the base classifiers and thus to generate the ensemble classifier output. The results showed a good performance of our proposed ensemble classifier. It beats all single classification algorithms, with a 99.3% accuracy rate and negligible classification errors.</span>

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“…This motivates us to contribute to this area by presenting our proposed approach which is expected to fully eliminate any potential packet length-based covert channel that is envisioned to leak secret information covertly. This paper is an extended version of our work presented in [7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Packet Length Covert Channels Crashed

Elsadig¹,

Fadlalla²

2018

JCSCM

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Advanced developments in network security tools and techniques have inspired attackers to find alternative ways to bypass them. A network covert channel is a wide-open door for attackers to leak confidential information or to convey malicious activities without being detected. Moreover, the rapid development in network technology and its applications provides a rich platform for developing different covert channel scenarios. A packet length covert channel is a network illicit communication channel that is featured as one of the most difficult covert channels to detect. It generates a covert traffic that is typically similar to normal traffic; this renders such a channel to be virtually impossible to discover. This paper investigates one type of packet length covert channels which exploits the variation of the network packets' lengths to convey secret messages-this type of covert channels does not need any rules to be distributed prior to the initiation of a covert session as other packet length covert channels need. The paper contributes by presenting an elimination approach to resolve this type of covert channel. This approach is sufficiently capable to completely distort the communication session between any sender and receiver who wish to establish such a covert channel. The proposed approach is successfully tested and validated.

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A balanced approach to eliminate packet length-based covert channels

Cited by 6 publications

References 20 publications

Network Covert channels

Network Covert channels

An ensemble model to detect packet length covert channels

Packet Length Covert Channels Crashed

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