Covert channels in IoT deployments through data hiding techniques

Interconnected and always on devices are continuously and rapidly growing in number and, according to a study from Cisco, will be three times the number of humans on earth in 2021. Unfortunately, recent events such as the DDoS mounted using the Mirai botnet, have shown that the level of resilience to intrusion and hacking of these devices is far from optimal and puts the systems connected to the Internet of Things in serious danger. Among such systems, industrial systems that are now being integrated into the IoT ecosystem, have revealed to be weak against the threat coming from the IT world. Such previously inexistent scenario opens up to a plethora of new attack patterns leveraging previously unexploited techniques. Among these, we argue that convert channels built by leveraging information hiding techniques could be exploited. To this aim, this position paper introduces the usage of convert channels, built on information hiding techniques, in IoT scenarios.