Building Covert Timing Channel of the IoT-Enabled MTS Based on Multi-Stage Verification

Liang, Chen, Baker, Thar, Li, Yuanzhang, Nawaz, Raheel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9588-0052 and Tan, Yu-An (2023) Building Covert Timing Channel of the IoT-Enabled MTS Based on Multi-Stage Verification. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 24 (2). pp. 2578-2595. ISSN 1524-9050

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Abstract

Although the global shipping industry is experiencing a productivity revolution due to the adoption of IoTs (Internet of Things), the dependence on complex data transmission and interactive centers is also increasing, which makes the IoT-enabled Maritime Transportation Systems (MTS) one of the most valuable but vulnerable industries against network security attacks. To guarantee the transmission security of confidential data, an important alternative in an untrustworthy IoT-enabled MTS is to apply the covert timing channels. This paper mainly introduces the construction of covert timing channel with low bit shifting rate and high reliability by multi-stage verification and error correction. For the covert timing channel schemes realized by active packet loss, the packet loss noise interferes with the channel's reliability. However, due to the constraints of stealthiness, the active packet loss ratio during covert communication is low, so more effective reliable strategies are needed to reduce noise interference. In the excellent scenario, when the bit error rate is lower than 0.08%, the transmission performance is kept at 0.49 bps. In the good scenario with strong network noise, although this method loses some performance, it can still maintain the transmission performance of 0.2 bps under the condition of bit error rate less than 1%, which effectively proves the effectiveness of multi-stage verification and error correction.