Traceroute Based IP Channel for Sending Hidden Short Messages

摘要

The paper proposes a novel IP channel for sending hidden short messages, based mainly on the use of the "traceroute" command and the IP header Record route options. Instead of encrypting a hidden message or embedding it into a multimedia object, as in traditional multimedia steganography, we process the entire message and generate several IP packets with different types to carry the secret message. Thereby we foil an eavesdropper who is primarily applying statistical tests to detect encrypted communication channels. We show that our approach provides more protection against Steganalysis and sniffing attacks. A friendly graphical tool has been implemented to demonstrate the proposed secret IP channel.