A robust packet-dropping covert channel for mobile intelligent terminals

Covert communication in this regard has been widely used for protecting the secrecy of communication. Voice over Long Term Evolution (VoLTE) is a packet-switched core network solution for high-speed and high-quality end-to-end services which usually applied to the communication between intelligent systems. However, covert channels using inter-packet delays and packet order in VoLTE services are limited by specific rules. Since minor modifications to overt traffic can be detected, existing covert channel solutions cannot be directly applied to VoLTE. Therefore, this study presents a robust packet loss covert timing channel by cascade hash coding with intelligent system. To ensure robustness and undetectability, we design hash-based inter-codeword verification, codeword self-verification based on cyclic redundancy check, and adaptive mapping matrix. The sender modulates the covert messages according to the sequence number of the actively dropped packets, and the receiver can retrieve the covert messages using a specialized verification method. To evaluate undetectability, robustness, throughput, and construction costs, a large number of experiments in mobile intelligent terminals have been conducted. The experimental results prove that the proposed scheme is feasible for VoLTE communication, as the covert message is shown to be transmitted secretly, and the bit error and throughput are within acceptable ranges.