A Novel Adaptable Framework for Covert Communications in Anonymized Protocols

Abstract

As digital trust has declined, services purporting to provide privacy and anonymity have become increasingly popular in today's online environment. While there are several examples of these types of applications, blockchain-based services like Bitcoin and Ethereum have emerged as a potential answer to some of these privacy concerns. Unfortunately, many of the same features that facilitate that privacy and anonymity can also be leveraged by nefarious actors to transmit and store information covertly. These features can also be used by government and military organizations for communications purposes. In this paper, we present a generic information hiding model incorporating anonymity that builds on existing classical steganographic models like the Prisoners' Problem. We then analyze our model with regards to blockchain protocols and present a novel blockchain-based address embedding scheme. Finally, we implement our scheme using the Ethereum platform.