An efficient VoLTE covert timing channel for 5 G networks: RDCTC

Mohammed Khudhair Abbas; Mehmet Tahir Sandikkaya

doi:10.1016/j.ijleo.2022.170076

An efficient VoLTE covert timing channel for 5 G networks: RDCTC

Mohammed Khudhair Abbas^*, Mehmet Tahir Sandikkaya

^*Corresponding author for this work

Department of Computer Engineering

Istanbul Technical University

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Covert Channels are necessary to protect the privacy of individuals as well as to obtain confidentiality to governmental and military agencies. A novel covert timing channel is proposed with three main improvements over the existing ones: Reorder Density (RD) metric-based packet reordering that reduces exposure, introducing Modified Turbo Code (MTC) for efficient encoding, and Discrete Haar Wavelet Transform (DHWT) that increases channel reliability. A threat model is proposed and shown to be inefficient to effectively meet covert channel properties against network jitter, noise, and curious attackers that try to identify a channel exists. Run and test is applied to investigate randomness of the proposed covert channel. The proposed covert channel is adoptable to 5 G VoLTE networks. These proposed strategies significantly improve the robustness while also minimizing the detectability of covert channels in VoLTE.

Original language	English
Article number	170076
Journal	Optik
Volume	270
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijleo.2022.170076
Publication status	Published - Nov 2022

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Elsevier GmbH

Funding

The authors would like to express their gratitude for Ministry of Iraqi Higher Education and Scientific Research. Also, great thanks to all Istanbul Technical University staff and especially the dean of the Computer and Informatics Engineering Faculty and the head of the Computer Engineering Department.

Funders	Funder number
Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research

Keywords

5G networks
Covert timing channels
Discrete Haar wavelet transform, threat model, randomness test
Modified turbo code
Reorder density
VoLTE, inter-packet delays

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10.1016/j.ijleo.2022.170076

Cite this

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title = "An efficient VoLTE covert timing channel for 5 G networks: RDCTC",

abstract = "Covert Channels are necessary to protect the privacy of individuals as well as to obtain confidentiality to governmental and military agencies. A novel covert timing channel is proposed with three main improvements over the existing ones: Reorder Density (RD) metric-based packet reordering that reduces exposure, introducing Modified Turbo Code (MTC) for efficient encoding, and Discrete Haar Wavelet Transform (DHWT) that increases channel reliability. A threat model is proposed and shown to be inefficient to effectively meet covert channel properties against network jitter, noise, and curious attackers that try to identify a channel exists. Run and test is applied to investigate randomness of the proposed covert channel. The proposed covert channel is adoptable to 5 G VoLTE networks. These proposed strategies significantly improve the robustness while also minimizing the detectability of covert channels in VoLTE.",

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N2 - Covert Channels are necessary to protect the privacy of individuals as well as to obtain confidentiality to governmental and military agencies. A novel covert timing channel is proposed with three main improvements over the existing ones: Reorder Density (RD) metric-based packet reordering that reduces exposure, introducing Modified Turbo Code (MTC) for efficient encoding, and Discrete Haar Wavelet Transform (DHWT) that increases channel reliability. A threat model is proposed and shown to be inefficient to effectively meet covert channel properties against network jitter, noise, and curious attackers that try to identify a channel exists. Run and test is applied to investigate randomness of the proposed covert channel. The proposed covert channel is adoptable to 5 G VoLTE networks. These proposed strategies significantly improve the robustness while also minimizing the detectability of covert channels in VoLTE.

AB - Covert Channels are necessary to protect the privacy of individuals as well as to obtain confidentiality to governmental and military agencies. A novel covert timing channel is proposed with three main improvements over the existing ones: Reorder Density (RD) metric-based packet reordering that reduces exposure, introducing Modified Turbo Code (MTC) for efficient encoding, and Discrete Haar Wavelet Transform (DHWT) that increases channel reliability. A threat model is proposed and shown to be inefficient to effectively meet covert channel properties against network jitter, noise, and curious attackers that try to identify a channel exists. Run and test is applied to investigate randomness of the proposed covert channel. The proposed covert channel is adoptable to 5 G VoLTE networks. These proposed strategies significantly improve the robustness while also minimizing the detectability of covert channels in VoLTE.

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KW - Discrete Haar wavelet transform, threat model, randomness test

KW - Modified turbo code

KW - Reorder density

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An efficient VoLTE covert timing channel for 5 G networks: RDCTC

Abstract

Bibliographical note

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Keywords

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