After attending a talk at my college about covert channels i was inspired to make my own
thus... i made my own
most of the channels that were discussed were on obfuscating that data transfer was even happening
we focused on some really cool systems like changing the amount of time between packets, or abusing the tcp standard
both of those were very interesting, but i (with no real proof other than vibes) would wager that most of those are overkill, and not needed unless you are in the most locked down of locked down areas
they also had the disadvantage of being much slower than conventional forms of data transfer
I came up with a "good enough" solution I think fits the most common need very easily, it does have the requirement of a website but thats small
basically i thought you should just be able to hide data in the url of requests. many contain abritrary(ish) amounts of data, so a few funky characters wouldnt be weird
it also allows for a lot of data to be sent quickly which is nice
it was trivial to implement on this very site. the scheme i came up with as a poc was requests to https://0xela.dev/cc-poc/{data}, where data is base64 encoded, using the URL_SAFE part of the base64 crate
on the server side i just print it out
I do have many other ideas though, this was just a simple poc thrown together in an hour
I think there is merit to a scheme such as https://0xela.dev/{a}/{b}/{c} with a b and c all being reasonable paths like blog or media or something
alos using the headers for accepted content might be interesting
sadly all these approaches are trace back-able with an ip address, which can be mitigated, but what if you could transmit data through a server you dont own?
I think there is an interesting idea behind using online games to transmit data via movements
think of two players in an abandon .io game server with facing direction denoting data
obv the downside is that if you dont own the server then it might go down but thats mitigate-able
idk i wanna write it if i do ill update this page