POSTER: An educational network protocol for covert channel analysis using patterns

The utilization of information hiding is on the rise among cybercriminals, e.g. to cloak the communication of malicious software as well as by ordinary users for privacy-enhancing purposes. A recent trend is to use network traffic in form of covert channels to convey secrets. In result, security expert training is incomplete if these aspects are not covered. This paper fills this gap by providing a method for teaching covert channel analysis of network protocols. We define a sample protocol called Covert Channel Educational Analysis Protocol (CCEAP) that can be used in didactic environments. Compared to previous works we lower the barrier for understanding network covert channels by eliminating the requirement for students to understand several network protocols in advance and by focusing on so-called hiding patterns.