bccstego: A Framework for Investigating Network Covert Channels
Matteo Repetto, Luca Caviglione, Marco Zuppelli · 2021
Modern malware increasingly exploits information hiding to remain undetected while attacking. To this aim, network covert channels, i.e., hidden communication paths established within legitimate flows, can be used to exfiltrate data or exchange commands without getting noticed by firewalls, antivirus, and intrusion detection systems. Since the secret data can be directly injected in various portions of the stream or encoded via suitable alterations of the traffic, spotting hidden communications is a challenging and poorly generalizable task. Moreover, the majority of works addressed IPv4, thus leaving the detection of covert channels targeting IPv6 almost unexplored.