Crafting Web Counters into Covert Channels

We present in this paper a new network storage channel WebShare that uses the plentiful, public Web counters for storage. Therefore, the physical locations of the WebShare encoder and decoder are not restricted to a single path. To make WebShare practical, we have addressed a number of thorny issues, such as the “noise” introduced by other legitimate Web requests, and synchronization between encoder and decoder. For the proof-of-concept purpose, we have experimented a WebShare prototype in the Internet, and have showed that it is practically feasible even when the Web counter and the encoder/decoder are separated by more than 20 router hops.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: SEC
• Authors: Xiapu Luo, Edmond W. W. Chan, Rocky K. C. Chang
• Keywords: Network Storage Channel, Public Web Counters, SEC 2007, Security Privacy, Web Counter