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NETsteg: Network-layer Steganography

GPLv3 license

What is it?

The above scripts are a PoC of a steganographic method which is used for hiding and transmitting data in the Network Layer of an application using some most-significant-bits (msbs) in the Time-To-Live (TTL) field in the IP header.

I inspired and adapted the idea from Chet Hosmer & Michael Raggo, which is described in their book with the title "Data Hiding: Exposing Concealed Data in Multimedia, Operating Systems, Mobile Devices and Network Protocols".

Some background

TTL is an 8-bit field in the ip header. That means its values can range from 0 - 255 or in binary from 00000000 to 11111111. But IPv4 is a best effort protocol. This in combination with the expansion of the internet makes kind of unnecessary to make use of all 8-bits provided for the TTL-field.

So what if we used only the 6 lsbs of the 8 bits provided for the ttl and use the 2 msbs for data. This could surprisingly work cause the worst case of TTL = 00111111 = 63 hops is enough for the modern networks to operate (some operating systems also use 64 as the initial default value for the TTL field).

In this way the 8-bit TTL field would look like this:

 XX 111111

So the two msbs are used for data hiding and the remaining six lsbs are used for the least TTL value.

So what if we wanted to secretly transmit the word: s3cr3tfl@g!

  1. The first step is to take every ascii character in the above text and transform it to its hex equivalent.
  2. Then break the hex equivalent into 2-bit chunks.
  3. Finally transmit every 2-bit chunk in the 2 msbs of the TTL field.

In this way the receiver would then extract the binary data from the TTL-field of each packet, which in this case are:

0111001100110011011000110111001000110011011101000110011001101100010000000110011100100001

and then would translate them into ascii text.

Python Implementation

The implementation is broken in two parts:

  • The encoder.py which is used to transmit the data using the above technique
  • And the decoder.py which is the receiver

Note: The code is very simple and is only to demonstrate the basic idea. Of course it could easily be adapted for more complex scenarios.

How to detect?

A simple detection heuristic would be to observe the traffic and try to identify if between two (or even more) IPs the TTL-field takes specific discrete values.

Scripts in action:

And if we observe the steg.pcac file produced by the decoder.py script, we see that it actually looks like a simple ping traffic with the only difference that the TTL values get changed very often and take only 4 different values (the ttl takes only 4 different values because we use two msbs for data, so 2^2=4).

Requirements:

To install the requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt --upgrade --user

References

  • Raggo, M.T. and Hosmer, C., 2012. Data hiding: exposing concealed data in multimedia, operating systems, mobile devices and network protocols. Newnes.

License

This project is licensed under the GPLv3 License - see the LICENSE file for details