Covert data transmission using secret-sharing and network steganography

Abstract

The present has made us more dependent on technology than ever before. As technology develops and new fields emerge, it has become more complicated to maintain a safe, secure, and covert environment for transmitting valuable information. Although cryptographic techniques are pretty strong in communication systems, they cannot be used as a standalone tool to communicate covertly. Covert transmission is vital for those who require extreme privacy and security, such as national defense organizations. Over the years, much research has been done based on covert data sent over a network. Our research has produced a new model to provide secure and hidden data transmission in a LAN. Our system model will be divided into secret sharing, network steganography, and hashing for integrity checks. The model will split the secret message into shares using Shamir’s secret sharing scheme to add redundancy to our model so that even if some shares are lost during transmission, the message can still be reconstructed. Each share is hashed, and selected bits from the hash are appended to the corresponding share to provide integrity. Finally, we have used an ARP steganography technique and an IP steganography algorithm to send the shares, where each share is sent through one of the covert channels but not both. The steganographic algorithms provide a covert transmission channel and confidentiality for the transmission. A comprehensive security analysis of the overall model has been provided, highlighting how it provides security and covertness, potential vulnerabilities and weaknesses, and possible solutions.