A balanced approach to eliminate packet length-based covert channels

When information is leaked covertly in a way that violate a system's security policy, a covert channel does exist. A covert channel is a channel that is exploited for illicit information flow. It is a serious and often undetectable security threat. Packet length covert channel is a type of network covert channels that recently has received a lot of attention by the research community. It exploits network packet lengths variations to encode secret messages. This paper explores the recent work in packet length-based covert channel developments, techniques, and countermeasures. Meanwhile, the paper introduces an approach to eliminate packet length covert channels. The proposed approach so far is practically implemented and verified.