TY - GEN
T1 - Traffic analysis attacks on a continuously-observable steganographic file system
AU - Troncoso, Carmela
AU - Diaz, Claudia
AU - Dunkelman, Orr
AU - Preneel, Bart
PY - 2007
Y1 - 2007
N2 - A continuously-observable steganographic file system allows to remotely store user files on a raw storage device; the security goal is to offer plausible deniability even when the raw storage device is continuously monitored by an attacker. Zhou, Pang and Tan have proposed such a system in [7] with a claim of provable security against traffic analysis. In this paper, we disprove their claims by presenting traffic analysis attacks on the file update algorithm of Zhou et al. Our attacks are highly effective in detecting file updates and revealing the existence and location of files. For multi-block files, we show that two updates are sufficient to discover the file. One-block files accessed a sufficient number of times can also be revealed. Our results suggest that simple randomization techniques are not sufficient to protect steganographic file systems from traffic analysis attacks.
AB - A continuously-observable steganographic file system allows to remotely store user files on a raw storage device; the security goal is to offer plausible deniability even when the raw storage device is continuously monitored by an attacker. Zhou, Pang and Tan have proposed such a system in [7] with a claim of provable security against traffic analysis. In this paper, we disprove their claims by presenting traffic analysis attacks on the file update algorithm of Zhou et al. Our attacks are highly effective in detecting file updates and revealing the existence and location of files. For multi-block files, we show that two updates are sufficient to discover the file. One-block files accessed a sufficient number of times can also be revealed. Our results suggest that simple randomization techniques are not sufficient to protect steganographic file systems from traffic analysis attacks.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=49949108041&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-540-77370-2_15
DO - 10.1007/978-3-540-77370-2_15
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:49949108041
SN - 354077369X
SN - 9783540773696
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 220
EP - 236
BT - Information Hiding - 9th International Workshop, IH 2007, Revised Selected Papers
T2 - 9th International Workshop on Information Hiding, IH 2007
Y2 - 11 June 2007 through 13 June 2007
ER -