CovertSYS

CovertSYS: A systematic covert communication approach for providing secure end-to-end conversation via social networks

Ahvanooey, Milad Taleby (Nanjing University; Nanyang Technological University; Tsinghua University Science)
Zhu, Mark Xuefang (Nanjing University)
Mazurczyk, Wojciech (Warsaw University of Technology)
Li, Qianmu (Nanjing University of Science and Technology)
Kilger, Max (University of Texas at San Antonio)
Choo, Kim Kwang Raymond (University of Texas at San Antonio)
Conti, M. (TU Delft Cyber Security; University of Padua)

2022

While encryption can prevent unauthorized access to a secret message, it does not provide undetectability of covert communications over the public network. Implementing a highly latent data exchange, especially with low eavesdropping/discovery probability, is challenging for practical scenarios, such as social and political movements in authoritarian regimes, military operations, and privacy preservation. Moreover, the current literature suffers from a low embedding capacity and monolingual applicability, limiting the amount of hiding secret data within short text messages using state-of-the-art algorithms, e.g., linguistic-based, structural-based, or coverless-based solutions. In this paper, we present a systematic covert communication technique called CovertSYS that enables a multilingual secure end-to-end conversation via messaging or social network platforms. The CovertSYS functions by encrypting a confidential message using a multi-factor authentication scheme and converting the encoded binary data into hidden Unicode symbols to be transmitted under cover of short text messages. We then conduct extensive experiments to confirm the security and validity of the proposed technique against state-of-the-art approaches. Our experimental results show that the CovertSYS provides a superior mean performance of 91.53% by improving the criteria scores: embedding capacity rate of 100%, imperceptibility rate of 76.4%, and distortion robustness rate of 98.2%. Finally, we discuss the practical implications of the proposed technique compared to the existing text steganography methods.

Information hiding
Text steganography
Covert communication
Privacy preservation
Applied cryptography

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:3776a93d-2fb2-4cb5-9316-48b8c53e467b

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jisa.2022.103368

2023-05-18

2214-2126

Journal of Information Security and Applications, 71

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2022 Milad Taleby Ahvanooey, Mark Xuefang Zhu, Wojciech Mazurczyk, Qianmu Li, Max Kilger, Kim Kwang Raymond Choo, M. Conti