Steganographic Packets

I had an idea a while ago about a method of sending data across a network link without sending a single byte of data in the packets themselves . Here’s our data broken down into nibbles:

Encoding our data this way does mean sending 2 packets per byte of data though, so we’d end up having to send packets (where is the number of bytes we want to send), but I think that’s a reasonable compromise for my use case. So, after a bit of tinkering in Python and monitoring our network card for ICMP packets ( ) we get something looking like this on the wire:

Now we need to use this information (specifically the times the packets arrived) to recover our encoded data.

Source: vimist.github.io