Solutions to Problems and Challenges

The following sections describe this research effort's approach to solving many of the problems and challenges that were identified in Section 2.3, as implemented via the SteganRTP reference implementation. Most of the solutions that have been devised during this research effort involved the creation of a communications protocol to operate within the covert channel established within the cover-medium. This protocol, detailed in Section employs a formatted message header which is prepended to user message data before being embedded in the cover-medium, providing various utility to the application making use of the protocol.

• Unreliable Transport
• Cover-Medium Size Limitations
• Latency
  • Inbound Packet Processing
  • Outbound Packet Processing
  • Encryption Overhead
  
  
• Tracking of RTP Streams
• Media Gateway Audio Modifications
  • Audio Codec Conversion
  
  
• Mid-session Audio Codec Change