The New Threats of Information Hiding: The Road Ahead

Abstract

A recent trend involves exploiting various information-hiding techniques to empower malware-for example, to bypass mobile device security frameworks or to exfiltrate sensitive data. The authors provide an overview of information-hiding techniques that can be utilized by malware. They showcase existing and emerging threats that use different types of data-hiding mechanisms (not just those adopting classical covert channels), with the goal of monitoring these threats and proposing efficient countermeasures.