Predicting Asymptotic Behavior of Network Covert Channels

The problem of covert communication via computer systems is almost as old as the problem of computer security itself. In the earliest years, covert communication was seen as mainly as a theoretical problem. But as computer systems have become more complex and ubiquitous, covert communication has begun to see practical use, particularly in the last two decades (see, e.g. Mazurcyk et al. in [MW19].) In this talk I will be reporting on the work we have been doing at NRL on evaluating the impact that existing research on the asymptotic behavior on covert channels has on embeddings in real-world channels.