Type of Document Master's Thesis Author Calhoun, Telvis Eugene Author's Email Address tcalhoun1@student.gsu.edu URN etd-04062009-213634 Title A COVERT CHANNEL USING 802.11 LANS Degree Master of Science Department Computer Science Advisory Committee
Advisor Name Title Dr. Raheem Beyah Committee Chair Dr. Xiaojun Cao Committee Member Dr. Yingshu Li Committee Member Keywords
- Steganography
- Intrusion detection
- Authentication
- Wireless networks
- Covert channels
- WiFi botnet
- Rate switching
- 802.11
Date of Defense 2009-03-23 Availability restricted Abstract We present a covert side channel that uses the 802.11 MAC rate switching protocol. The covert channel provides a general method to hide communications in an 802.11 LAN. The technique uses a one-time password algorithm to ensure high-entropy randomness of the covert messages. We investigate how the covert side channel affects node throughput in mobile and non-mobile scenarios. We also investigate the covertness of the covert side channel using standardized entropy. The results show that the performance impact is minimal and increases slightly as the covert channel bandwidth increases. We further show that the channel has 100% accuracy with minimal impact on rate switching entropy. Finally, we present two applications for the covert channel: covert authentication and covert WiFi botnets.Files
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