A Covert Communication Method Based on User-Generated Content Sites

Qingfeng Tan, Peipeng Liu, Jinqiao Shi, Xiao Wang, Li Guo

Abstract: With the worldwide increasing of Internet censorship, censorship-resistance technology has attracted more and more attentions, some famous systems, such as Tor and JAP, have been deployed to provide public service for censorship-resistance. However, these systems all rely on dedicated infrastructure and entry points for service accessibility. The network infrastructure and entry points may become the target of censorship attack. In this paper, a UGC-based method is proposed (called user-generated content based covert communication, UGC3) for covert communication in a friends-to-friends (F2F) manner. It uses existing infrastructures (i.e., UGC sites ) to form a fully distributed overlay network. An efficient resource discovery algorithm is proposed to negotiate the rendezvous point. Analysis shows that this method is able to circumvent internet censorship with user repudiation and fault tolerance.