Detection of Side-Channel Communication in a MANET Environment

Side-Channel communication is a form of traffic in which malicious parties communicate secretly over a wireless network. This is often established through the modification of Ethernet frame header fields, such as the Frame Check Sequence (FCS). The FCS is responsible for determining whether or not a frame has been corrupted in transmission, and contains a value calculated through the use of a predetermined polynomial. A malicious party may send messages that appear as nothing more than naturally corrupted noise on a network to those who are not the intended recipient. A metric known as Hamming Distance (HD) has been proposed in an attempt to differentiate purposely corrupted frames from naturally corrupted ones. In theory, it should be possible to recognize purposely corrupted frames based on how high this HD value is, as it signifies how many bits are different between the expected and the received FCS values. It is hypothesized that a range of threshold values based off of this metric exist, which may allow for the detection of Side-Channel communication across all scenarios.