A Covert TLS Encryption Transmission Method Based on Network Covert Channel

TLS 1.2 protocol, as one of the most essential secure communication protocols, is widely used for web services. However, it has been exposed to many vulnerabilities so far. In order to exploit these vulnerabilities to carry out attacks, the attacker must possess the necessary information. Based on this principle, we proposed a covert TLS encryption transmission method in this paper, which uses a storage network covert channel to transmit important handshake information. The network covert channel hides the true TLS handshake information, thereby improving the security of the entire transmission process. We conducted extensive experiments to evaluate its performance. The experimental results show that our covert channel can guarantee high covertness without delay. Meanwhile, vulnerability testing shows that our scheme can resist most attacks.