VoNR-IPD: A Novel Timing-Based Network Steganography for Industrial Internet

As the predominant trade secret of manufacturing enterprises, industrial data may be monitored and stolen by competitive adversaries during the transmission via open wireless link. Such information leakage will cause severe economic losses. Hence, a VoNR-IPD covert timing steganography based on 5G network is proposed in this paper, in which VoNR traffic is employed as the steganographic carrier of covert communication in Industrial Internet. Interference of network jitter noise is fully considered and the high-order statistical properties of jittered VoNR interpacket delays (IPDs) are imitated during the modulation of confidential industrial data. Thus, the generated covert VoNR IPDs can possess consistent statistical properties with the normal case in order to improve undetectability. Besides, the synchronization mechanism of steganographic embedding mode is designed to control the embedding density of industrial data flexibly. The experimental results show that our scheme can resist statistical-based detections and the network noise effectively, which outperforms the existing methods in terms of undetectability and robustness.