Characterization and Behavioral Analysis of Hybrid Covert Channel

Covert Channels are malicious conversations in a legitimate secured network communication that violates the security policies of a legitimate network. Covertness in a covert channel is due to the non-transparency in the communication between the users of the communication channel whose motto is to leak information. A Hybrid Covert Channel (HCC) is the co-existence of two or more variants of network covert channels which tends to behave as a single coherent covert channel. Covert channel or HCC detection is very difficult to perform as all detection methods is at infancy. The current market value for the field of network security is around 15.55 billion dollars and is said to become 20 billion dollars by the end of 2020. The detection engine must employ a combination of protocol detection scheme and signature detection scheme along with bandwidth analysis through entropy mechanism. There are vast research opportunities in the network security and forensics that covers wide aspects of the detection, attack modelling, channel analysis and behavioral analysis with inclusive focus on the development in IP based network.