Silence Speaks Volumes: A New Paradigm for Covert Communication via History Timing Patterns
Christoph Weissenborn, Steffen Wendzel

TL;DR
This paper introduces a novel covert communication paradigm called History Covert Channels (HCC) that uses past network event timings to embed data, enhancing stealth and increasing transmission bitrate.
Contribution
The paper proposes a new HCC method utilizing relative timing pointers, reducing reliance on centralized clocks and improving robustness and undetectability.
Findings
Higher bitrate achieved compared to previous HCC methods
Reduced detectability through use of historical data references
Enhanced robustness of covert links
Abstract
A Covert Channel (CC) exploits legitimate communication mechanisms to stealthily transmit information, often bypassing traditional security controls. Among these, a novel paradigm called History Covert Channels (HCC) leverages past network events as reference points to embed covert messages. Unlike traditional timing- or storage-based CCs, which directly manipulate traffic patterns or packet contents, HCCs minimize detectability by encoding information through small pointers to historical data. This approach enables them to amplify the size of transmitted covert data by referring to more bits than are actually embedded. Recent research has explored the feasibility of such methods, demonstrating their potential to evade detection by repurposing naturally occurring network behaviors as a covert transmission medium. This paper introduces a novel method for establishing and maintaining…
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Taxonomy
TopicsInternet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · Digital Media Forensic Detection · Network Security and Intrusion Detection
