“From Bear to Vault: Designing a New Protocol to Extend the APT Communications Toolset” Authors: Partridge, Chris; Hendee, Nicholas. Accepted: December 12-14, 2018 to the 2018 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence, in the Symposium on Cyber Warfare, Cyber Defense, and Cyber Security. Published: January 2, 2020 in IEEE Xplore®, ISBN 978-1-7281-1360-9.
With my classmate Nicholas Hendee, we investigated what contemporary APTs do for covert communication. We prototyped a novel system combining the more potent ideas from a number of adversaries, which allows for highly flexible data exfiltration and C2 - if you’re willing to write some wrappers.
The paper was presented at the 2018 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence, in the Symposium on Cyber Warfare, Cyber Defense, and Cyber Security, and published in IEEE Xplore.
It’s available from the American CSE proceedings portal, and I’ve republished it in higher quality here because information should be free. It’s also indexed in IEEE Xplore if you’re an IEEE member.