Minecraft Altered Skin Channel (MASC) - ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection Access content directly
Conference Papers Year : 2021

Minecraft Altered Skin Channel (MASC)

Sam Abrams
  • Function : Author
  • PersonId : 1154435
Brandon Keller
  • Function : Author
  • PersonId : 1154436
Kenneth Nero
  • Function : Author
  • PersonId : 1154437
Gino Placella
  • Function : Author
  • PersonId : 1154438
Daryl Johnson
  • Function : Author
  • PersonId : 1154439

Abstract

Governments across the world are increasingly pushing for encryption backdoors and other privacy breaking features. One possible method to maintain privacy in a post-encryption environment is to utilize covert channels as a means to hide traffic from monitoring authorities. Covert channels have often been used to hide unwanted or prohibited web traffic, however, the traffic need not be malicious for there to be a necessity for privacy.In this paper we explore a novel covert channel named Minecraft Altered Skin Channel (MASC) that exploits the inherent inefficiencies within Minecraft skin images. Data is transferred by reflecting a modified skin image off of the publicly accessible Minecraft Skin servers. We utilize a custom steganographic algorithm and a public Application Programming Interface (API), which when combined, grant the ability to quickly and asynchronously send and receive encoded messages without any direct communication between the two or more participating parties. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the scheme by implementing an efficient sender-receiver proof of concept. Finally, we go on to empirically analyze the program’s results and show the comparatively high bitrate of the channel.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
512098_1_En_9_Chapter.pdf (776.78 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origin : Files produced by the author(s)

Dates and versions

hal-03746056 , version 1 (04-08-2022)

Licence

Attribution

Identifiers

Cite

Sam Abrams, Brandon Keller, Kenneth Nero, Gino Placella, Daryl Johnson. Minecraft Altered Skin Channel (MASC). 36th IFIP International Conference on ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection (SEC), Jun 2021, Oslo, Norway. pp.134-145, ⟨10.1007/978-3-030-78120-0_9⟩. ⟨hal-03746056⟩
82 View
6 Download

Altmetric

Share

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More