Researchers from the OMI institute published two workshop papers at this year's ARES conference in Linköping, Sweden.
The first paper was published as part of the CUING (Criminal Use of Information Hiding) workshop and is a result of the ATTRIBUT project that the OMI institute is part of. The talk was given by Friedrich Gross and the paper presents a configurable network warden that aids the analysis of information hiding-capable malware.
Friedrich Gross, Denis Petrov, Pascal Ruffing, Sebastian Zillien and Steffen Wendzel: A Warden to Analyze and Counter Stegomalware Activities, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-35586-7_10
Another paper within the scope of the CUING workshop (but presented by Steffen Wendzel as part of an EU Workshop at the same venue) is dealing with the optimization of covert channel amplification:
Carina Heßeling, Jörg Keller, Steffen Wendzel: Optimized DYST-like Amplification Covert Channel, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-37218-5_3
Such DYST-like channels indirectly signal a covert message. To this end, they send a small reference to a larger data chunk found elsewhere. These channels have been introduced in a TDSC paper (see below) but already led to several follow-up publications.
Steffen Wendzel, Tobias Schmidbauer, Sebastian Zillien, Jörg Keller: DYST (Did You See That?): An Amplified Covert Channel That Points To Previously Seen Data, in: IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), Vol. 22(1), 2025, https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2024.3410679