Stream Control Transmission Protocol Steganography

Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a new transport layer protocol that is due to replace TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) protocols in future IP networks. Currently, it is implemented in such operating systems like BSD, Linux, HP-UX or Sun Solaris. It is also supported in Cisco network devices operating system (Cisco IOS) and may be used in Windows. This paper describes potential steganographic methods that may be applied to SCTP and may pose a threat to network security. Proposed methods utilize new, characteristic SCTP features like multi-homing and multi-streaming. Identified new threats and suggested countermeasures may be used as a supplement to RFC 5062, which describes security attacks in SCTP protocol and can induce further standard modifications.