Covert Channel Attacks on VPN Tunnels

Student: Nemirovskaya Yana

Faculty: HSE Tikhonov Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics (MIEM HSE)

Educational Programme: Cyber Security (Specialist)

Final Grade: 9

Year of Graduation: 2020

The main task of this final qualifying paper is to implement a covert channel attack and analyze the possibilities of this attack. This problem was solved with the following: • Existing methods for implementing a hidden logical channel have been investigated; • Three programs were implemented to implement the attack itself; • An attack was carried out through different implementations of VPN tunnels. In addition, for VPN tunnels implemented on the basis of FIOT and ESP protocols, for different modes of these VPN tunnels, the probabilities of accepting a message transmitted through a covert channel implemented by the selected method were estimated. Regarding known utilities that can be used to implement VPN tunnels, it has been shown that such VPN tunnels are vulnerable to this kind of attack.

Full text (added January 14, 2020)

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