Secure android covert channel with robust survivability to service provider restrictions

Abstract

The overarching field of information hiding has been extensively researched. However, the potential for use of smartphones-communicating over cellular service provider networks-has yet to be fully explored. In this paper, we propose Android-Stego-a covert communication framework for Android smartphones. We have presented results analysing real-world cellular service-providers' restrictions on MMS messages and the corrective actions they take using a prototype implementation of Android-Stego. With the prototype implementation, we have also analysed the messages at both the sending and the receiving ends to determine the service providers' actions on MMS messagessuch as compression and/or format conversion.