Improving Hard Disk Contention-based Covert Channel in Cloud Computing Environment
This addresses security vulnerabilities in cloud computing for steganographers and attackers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing hard disk contention methods.
The paper tackles the problem of creating covert channels for secret data exchange in cloud computing environments by proposing CloudSteg, a method based on hard disk contention between cloud instances on the same physical machine. Experimental results in OpenStack show it achieves about 0.1 bps bandwidth, which is 1000 times higher than the state-of-the-art.
Steganographic methods allow the covert exchange of secret data between parties aware of the procedure. The cloud computing environment is a new and hot target for steganographers, and currently not many solutions have been proposed. This paper proposes CloudSteg which is a steganographic method that allows the creation of a covert channel based on hard disk contention between the two cloud instances that reside on the same physical machine. Experimental results conducted using open source cloud environment OpenStack, show that CloudSteg is able to achieve a bandwidth of about 0.1 bps which is 1000 times higher than is known from the state-of-the-art version.