Unreliable Transport

One of the most significant challenges to utilizing RTP packet payloads as cover-medium is that RTP generally employs UDP as its underlying transport protocol. This is appropriate for a streaming multimedia protocol, however it is less than ideal for a reliable covert communications channel. UDP is a datagram messaging protocol which is considered connectionless and unreliable[5]. As such, each packet's successful delivery and order of arrival is not guaranteed. Any message data which is split across multiple RTP cover-packets may arrive out of order or not arrive at all.