Tackling Data Mining Risks: A Tripartite Covert Channel Merging Blockchain and IPFS

Abstract

Blockchain-based covert communication enables undetectable data transmission by constructing covert channels in blockchain networks. However, extant approaches require transactions carrying secret data to be permanently preserved in the public ledger, which cannot resist data mining. Besides, these solutions cost up to $48,169 to transmit 1-MegaByte (MB) data. In this paper, we introduce a Tripartite Covert Communication Model (TCCM), which amalgamates blockchain and the Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) to facilitate the transfer of MB-level files while simultaneously circumventing data mining. TCCM comprises an IPFS covert channel, a ledger-layer covert channel, and a network-layer covert channel. The IPFS covert channel transmits the initial secret data. The ledger-layer covert channel embeds a timestamp into the blockchain transaction, which governs the construction time of the network-layer covert channel. The network-layer covert channel conveys the content identifier of the secret data utilizing Bitcoin's inventory message. We further present a TCCM instantiation and formally prove its unobservability. We instant TCCM to evaluate its performance on the Bitcoin mainnet. We also discuss its scalability, real-world use cases, and ethical considerations. Experimental outcomes demonstrate that the proposed instantiation is unobservable and able to transmit 100-MB files at a cost of $1.47.