

Show HN: Transmissions over time-based side channels across a network - deutronium
https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/timeshifter/

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mdisraeli
Neat little experiment! Delays between packets are not normally logged, so
detecting this would be a challenge - any ideas of the best way to detect this
sort of channel?

Interesting side note: If I recall correctly, a variant of this can be used to
de-anonymise Tor connections if you have visibility over the entry and exit
connections. Measure time and size relationships between packets and look for
corresponding matching ones at the other end. Not 100% accurate, but with lots
of connections it builds in confidence.

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joshribakoff
In theory the person running this protocol can just calibrate their settings
until they are comfortably flying under the radar. You could make the
"messages" less frequent which means someone trying to log the traffic will
consume more bandwidth (increase the cost to log it) & tweak the algorithm to
make it consume more CPU to decode/encode (making it difficult to "try" all
the combinations of traffic to see if they happen to decode into something
that matches a heuristic for a hidden message). Given a sufficiently large
enough amount of "cover" bandwidth to hide in, and assuming your message is
sufficient small, you'd be impossible to detect. Pretty brilliant.

Maybe the vibrations of our universe in "string theory" are some sort of
message, too ;)

