HTTP Header Reordering-based Covert Channel Protocol

Although the field of covert channels has received a lot of attention, there are still a few flaws in the current covert systems available in the literature. First, we discovered that some existing covert channel protocols are detectable. Second, the most related works proposed covert channel protocols that have low throughput or simply do not publish information about their throughput performance. Third, some systems do not use error correction and are thus susceptible to disruption. Considering the above major shortcomings into account, this study aims to create a covert channel with improved throughput without sacrificing security. This paper presents a new covert channel protocol that utilizes the fact that the order of HTTP headers can be changed without affecting its normal operation. The protocol was implemented using current development environments and tested under different scenarios. Performance evaluations showed that the proposed covert channel protocol was successful in obtaining a sufficient throughput improvement over existing protocols while maintaining security.