MBCT: A Monero-Based Covert Transmission Approach with On-chain Dynamic Session Key Negotiation

Abstract: Traditional covert transmission (CT) approaches have been hindering CT application while blockchain technology offers new avenue. Current blockchain-based CT approaches require off-chain negotiation of critical information and often overlook the dynamic session keys updating, which increases the risk of message and key leakage. Additionally, in some approaches the covert transactions exhibit obvious characteristics that can be easily detected by third-parties. Moreover, most approaches do not address the issue of decreased reliability of message transmission in blockchain attack scenarios. Bitcoin- and Ethereum-based approaches also have the issue of transaction linkability, which can be tackled by Monero-based approaches because of the privacy protection mechanisms in Monero. However, Monero-based CT has the problem of sender repudiation. In this paper, we propose a novel Monero-Based CT approach (MBCT), which enables on-chain session key dynamically updating without off-chain negotiation. MBCT can assure non-repudiation of transmission participants, confidentiality of keys, reliability of message transmission and less observable characteristics. There are achieved by the three components in MBCT, namely, a sender authentication method, a dynamically on-chain session key updating method and a state feedback method. We implement MBCT in Monero-0.18.1.0 and the experiment results demonstrate its high embedding capacity of MBCT.