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.
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References
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Ryan Cervantes for his guidance and continued support throughout the research process.
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Appendix
Appendix
The lookup table used for encoding in the provided example
The reverse lookup table used for decoding in the provided example
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Abrams, S., Keller, B., Nero, K., Placella, G., Johnson, D. (2021). Minecraft Altered Skin Channel (MASC). In: Jøsang, A., Futcher, L., Hagen, J. (eds) ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection. SEC 2021. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 625. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78120-0_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78120-0_9
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