Steganography using the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP)
This addresses the need for secure, undetectable data transmission in instant messaging for users of platforms like Google Talk and Cisco, though it is incremental as it adapts steganography to a specific protocol.
The paper tackles the problem of covert communication by proposing the first mechanisms for hiding data in the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), a popular instant messaging protocol, resulting in a more robust method compared to content-based approaches with preliminary security analysis against entropic-based steganalysis.
We present here the first work to propose different mechanisms for hiding data in the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). This is a very popular instant messaging protocol used by many messaging platforms such as Google Talk, Cisco, LiveJournal and many others. Our paper describes how to send a secret message from one XMPP client to another, without raising the suspicion of any intermediaries. The methods described primarily focus on using the underlying protocol as a means for steganography, unlike other related works that try to hide data in the content of instant messages. In doing so, we provide a more robust means of data hiding and additionally offer some preliminary analysis of its general security, in particular against entropic-based steganalysis.