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Creation of a covert communications network for evasion of surveillance

Author

Rose Nish, University of the Pacific

Date of Award

2016

Document Type

Thesis - Pacific Access Restricted

Degree Name

Master of Science (M.S.)

Department

Engineering

First Advisor

Jeffrey Schafer

First Committee Member

Chadi Kari

Second Committee Member

Emma Hayes

Abstract

People all around the world have their internet access censored or monitored by governments or large corporations. Whistleblowers and human rights activists oftentimes need to communicate in secret to avoid persecution by the powerful organization monitoring their communications. Current anonymity systems often depend on the public internet, and as such are subject to some degree of interference. Cloak is a textual communication network created to hide the existence of the network itself from an outside observer, such as a repressive government or corrupt corporation. Cloak does not use the public internet, and as such would evade the majority of the monitoring in place today. Cloak also does not use any special infrastructure or create its own infrastructure, minimizing the risk of infrastructure attacks. Finally, Cloak provides plausible deniability for its users should they be investigated. Cloak works by hiding its messages inside of normal phone activity. Two Cloak nodes can identify each other by looking at wifi probe messages that are generated by phones in the vicinity of an open wifi hotspot. They can then connect to the hotspot and browse like normal, while hiding messages inside their browsing. Because this is open wifi, the other nodes can see the hidden messages and store them, and carry them closer to their destination. Cloak can hide its messages in a lot of ways. It can first send images with messages embedded in them. It can also use places where a website asks for data in a opaque format, such as YouTube video ids. Finally, if encrypted browsing is available, a Cloak node can just send the encrypted message and act like something went wrong with its encrypted browsing.

Pages

65

ISBN

9781339784670

Recommended Citation

Nish, Rose. (2016). Creation of a covert communications network for evasion of surveillance. University of the Pacific, Thesis - Pacific Access Restricted. https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/216

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.