$\mathbb {ABC}$ABC-$ {\mathbb{Channel}}$Channel: An Advanced Blockchain-Based Covert Channel

Establishing efficient and robust covert channels is crucial for secure communication within insecure network environments. With its inherent benefits of decentralization and anonymization, blockchain has gained considerable attention in developing covert channels. To guarantee a highly secure covert channel, channel negotiation should be contactlessbeforethe communication, carrier transaction features must be indistinguishable from normal transactionsduringthe communication, and communication identities must be untraceableafterthe communication. Such a full-lifecycle covert channel is indispensable to defend against a versatile adversary who intercepts two communicating parties comprehensively (e.g., on-chain and off-chain). Unfortunately, it has not been thoroughly investigated in the literature. We make the first effort to achieve a full-lifecycle covert channel, a novel blockchain-based covert channel namedABC-Channel. We tackle a series of challenges, such as off-chain contact dependency, increased masquerading difficulties as growing transaction volume, and time-evolving, communicable yet untraceable identities, to achieve contactless channel negotiation, indistinguishable transaction features, and untraceable communication identities, respectively. We develop a working prototype to validateABC-Channeland conduct extensive tests on the Bitcoin testnet. The experimental results demonstrate thatABC-Channelachieves substantially secure covert capabilities. In comparison to existing methods, it also exhibits state-of-the-art transmission efficiency.