Steganography in Handling Oversized IP Packets

This paper identifies new class of network steganography methods that utilize mechanisms to handle oversized packets in IP networks: IP fragmentation, PMTUD (Path MTU Discovery) and PLPMTUD (Packetization Layer Path MTU Discovery). In particular, we propose two new steganographic methods and two extensions of existing ones. We show how IP fragmentation simplifies utilizing steganographic methods which requires transmitter-receiver synchronization. We present how mentioned mechanisms can be used to enable hidden communication for both versions of IP protocol: 4 and 6. Also the detection of the proposed methods is enclosed in this paper.