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Phony TCP Retransmissions Can Hide Secret Messages
Hugh Pickens writes "New Scientist reports that a team of steganographers at the Institute of Telecommunications in Warsaw, Poland have figured out how to send hidden messages using the internet's transmission control protocol (TCP) using a method that might help people in totalitarian regimes avoid censorship. Web, file transfer, email and peer-to-peer networks all use TCP, which ensures that data packets are received securely by making the sender wait until the receiver returns a 'got it' message. If no such acknowledgment arrives (on average 1 in 1000 packets gets lost or corrupted), the sender's computer sends the packet again in a system known as TCP's retransmission mechanism. The new steganographic system, dubbed retransmission steganography (RSTEG), relies on the sender and receiver using software that deliberately asks for retransmission even when email data packets are received successfully (PDF). 'The receiver intentionally signals that a loss has occurred,' says Wojciech Mazurczyk. 'The sender then retransmits the packet but with some secret data inserted in it.' Could a careful eavesdropper spot that RSTEG is being used because the first sent packet is different from the one containing the secret message? As long as the system is not over-used, apparently not, because if a packet is corrupted, the original packet and the retransmitted one will differ from each other anyway, masking the use of RSTEG."
I realize that all forms of steganography are basically security through obscurity, but this one is even more inane. Unless subjected to additional protection, anyone aware of this form of steganography could easily track it, and more importantly, it would look suspicious in traffic logs (drastically increased retrans requests, but only for a small subset of the TCP connections logged). Steganography should look innocuous, in addition to hiding information, if you want it to work.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
They probably have another paper ready "Detecting RSTEG use through resent packets frequency statistical analysis"...
Then your stego channel detects an error thanks to its checksumming. And it retransmits. Much like TCP. In fact, your stego channel could just be another layer of TCP.
no, because you can simulate the normal faliure rate, and so send 1kB of steganographised data per 1MB of real data (on average). While this isnt a particularly high rate, it means that you can send a few kB of text to your friend when it seems you are just sending some photos of your holiday/party/whatever. A few kB of text sounds like a pretty reasonable amound of information to be sending, especially if compressed first.
>> you'd get an insanely poor data rate
The target application is busting through mass censorship by government entities. Even the equivalent throughput of a 300baud modem is better than no connectivity at all. Heck, I bet most of the /. readers over the age of 35 spent a goodly portion of their youth msging each other on local BBs at 1200baud or less --> and we thought it was lightning speed (compared to pen n'paper over snail mail).
I think you'd want that the other way around. Send the ecrypted data first, then retransmit the true data. That way, when an eavesdropper assembles all of the packets they will overwrite the "damaged" cipher packets with true data packets. They'll wind up with a perfectly clean file.
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