An Insight in to Differential Entropy Analyzer (DEA) for Detecting Hybrid Covert Channel in Secured Communication
Anjan K Koundinya, K S Sriranjini · 2017
A covert channel is a mechanism used to transmit information secretly across a network by violating the security policies. It poses a major threat to data involving high security like defence secrets, data related to a company's project which involves copyrights, etc. Since the popularity of the internet is increasing, detection of covert communication in a network is very essential to prevent any data loss during communication. There are many methods present to detect the presence of covert communication namely statistical signature method, message sequence chart analyser, etc. But these methods do not provide accurate results. In this paper, a method is proposed which will focus on entropy based measures for detection of covert channel in a network. Two major methods for detection of covert communication in a network are sliding window entropy detection method and differential entropy analyser. Sliding window protocol was applied for data link layer and if the entropy obtained lies in the range Entropy<;0 or Entropy<;1, the channel is said to be safe. It was observed that for accurate results, the sliding window protocol could be applied only for small amount of data.