Steganography in Commonly Used HF Radio Protocols

Architecture and Background

Additional Extra Materials are available here: Steganography in Commonly Used HF Radio Protocols Paul Drapeau PRINCIPAL SECURITY RESEARCHER, CONFER TECHNOLOGIES INC. Brent Dukes Imagine having the capability to covertly send messages to an individual or a larger audience, without the need for large centralized infrastructure where your message could be observed, intercepted, or tampered with by oppressive governments or other third parties. We will discuss the opportunities and challenges with steganography implementations in widely used amateur radio digital modes, and present a proof of concept implementation of hiding messages within innocuous transmissions using the JT65 protocol.

Vulnerability Analysis

This technique could theoretically be used to implement a low cost, low infrastructure, covert, world wide short message broadcasting or point to point protocol. No messages in codes or ciphers intended to obscure the meaning thereof were actually transmitted over the amateur bands during the creation of this talk. Paul Drapeau is currently the Principal Security Researcher for Confer Technologies Inc.

Exploitation and Demonstrations

He has held senior level IT security roles and consulted on information security topics for various organizations for over 15 years. Paul has a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Rhode Island and has been licensed as an amateur radio operator since 1986. Brent Dukes has a decade of experience working in software and systems engineering roles.

Remediation and Defensive Strategies

He spends his nights tied to various hardware hacking projects sitting in pieces all over his lab, and participating in CTFs. His idea of fun is reverse engineering and modifying toys and consumer electronics for the purposes of good. Brent has been a licensed amateur radio operator since 2006. Paul Drapeau - Twitter: @pdogg77 Brent Dukes - Twitter: @TheDukeZip