Stenog-Shell framework for anonymous file exchange

Abstract

Email systems and removable storage devices are the two most popular and user-friendly mechanisms of file exchange that provide privacy preserving and security for data communication. Most previous work has focused on mitigating external attacks on data communication by improving data encryption and integrity techniques. In this paper, we present a novel anonymization-based framework (Stenog-Shell) that focuses on internal attacks on breached emails and stolen removable storage devices (i.e., the attacks from the insiders of an organization who have full awareness and even access to the targeted data). We also propose a novel scheme to disguise the file's identity based on stenography. To evaluate our approach, we implemented our Stenog-Shell prototype and tested it with a realistic application in both emails and removable storage devices environments. Our results indicate that our Stenog-Shell prototype can effectively support several file formats with low memory usage and high performance.