Community Covert Communication - Dynamic Mass Covert Communication Through Social Media

Abstract: Since the early 2010s, social network-based influence technologies have grown almost exponentially. Initiated by the U.S. Army's early OEV system in 2011, a number of companies specializing in this field have emerged. The most (in)famous cases are Bell Pottinger, Cambridge Analytica, Aggregate-IQ and, more recently, Team Jorge. In this paper, we consider the use-case of sock puppet master activities, which consist in creating hundreds or even thousands of avatars, in organizing them into communities and implement influence operations. On-purpose software is used to automate these operations (e.g. Ripon software, AIMS) and organize these avatar populations into communities. The aim is to organize targeted and directed influence communication to rather large communities (influence targets). The goal of the present research work is to show how these community management techniques (social networks) can also be used to communicate/disseminate relatively large volumes (up to a few tens of Mb) of multi-level encrypted information to a limited number of actors. To a certain extent, this can be compared to a Dark Post-type function, with a number of much more powerful potentialities. As a consequence, the concept of communication has been totally redefined and disrupted, so that eavesdropping, interception and jamming operations no longer make sense.