Feign east, strike west! Constructing covert channel on TLS 1.3

Publication Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

1-2026

Abstract

The transport layer is a critical component of the Internet protocol stack, providing reliable data delivery and securing the communication channel between clients and servers. TLS 1.3, the de facto standard protocol for this layer, is deployed on billions of devices and provides the confidentiality and integrity of most web traffic. Yet the very standardization and protocol transparency that make TLS so successful also enable mandatory network auditing and censorship. Network intermediaries can require disclosure of session keys or perform deep packet inspection (DPI) to verify that the communication complies with local policies, effectively breaking the promise of end-to-end encryption. Existing countermeasures either deviate from standard TLS or introduce non-compliant traffic patterns, rendering them detectable by modern censors. In this paper, we propose CCCC, a covert communication scheme that is fully compliant with standard TLS 1.3. Our key insight is twofold: (i) we efficiently construct collision ciphertexts, which allow a single AES ciphertext-tag pair to be decrypted successfully; (ii) we reduce the transmission of a covert message to the transmission of an innocuous vector, which is embedded within a standard EdDSA signature during the TLS handshake without undermining public verifiability. For a compulsory auditor who holds only the session key, every message—the handshake with its valid signature and all subsequent application records—appears perfectly normal and decrypts to a harmless overt message. The intended receiver, who holds a pre-shared secret key, recovers the vector from the signature and reconstructs the hidden message via the collision ciphertext. We formally define the security properties of collision ciphertexts, provide an efficient instantiation using AES-GCM and EdDSA, and implement a full prototype. Comprehensive performance evaluation demonstrates practical efficiency of our scheme, with only moderate overhead compared to standard TLS 1.3.

Keywords

Compulsory auditor, Covert communication, Dual valid authenticated encryption, Transport layer security

Discipline

Information Security

Research Areas

Cybersecurity

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security

Volume

21

First Page

8416

Last Page

8430

ISSN

1556-6013

Identifier

10.1109/TIFS.2026.3725552

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2026.3725552

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