Real-time covert communication

Abstract

In recent years, the censorship measures taken by various countries have introduced large-scale and sophisticated apparatuses to prevent citizens from accessing the internet freely. Numerous efforts have been made in this field to counter the censorship measures, with the latest approach being the idea of using the traffic generated by large-scale communication/interaction platforms that are used by millions of users daily as a carrier for covert data and thus foil the ability of adversaries to detect covert transmission. Due to the large collateral damage associated with blocking these applications by the censor, this approach proves to be a crucial technique. Although existing work supports secure transmissions over these applications, they are unsuitable for real-time communication. Our work proposes a system that allows users to establish real-time communication channels that use online multiplayer video game traffic as its carrier. We describe how our system can be leveraged for low-latency data transmissions and its performance in a controlled lab setting.