Inter-Protocol Steganography for Real-Time Services and Its Detection Using Traffic Coloring Approach

Due to improvements in defensive systems, network threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex as cybercriminals are using various methods to cloak their actions. This, among others, includes the application of network steganography e.g. to hide the communication between an infected host and a malicious control server by embedding commands into innocent-looking traffic. Currently, a new subtype of such methods called inter-protocol steganography emerged. It utilizes relationships between two or more overt protocols to hide data. In this paper, we present new inter-protocol hiding techniques which are suitable for real-time services. Afterwards, we introduce and present preliminary results of a novel steganography detection approach which relies on network traffic coloring.