POSTER: Abusing URL Shortening Services for Stealthy and Resilient Message Transmitting

URL shortening services (USS) have been widely used on the Internet, but are currently prone to abuse. In this poster, we exploit the possibility of building a novel stealthy and robust message transmission channel through use of USS. A text string or binary file can be transmitted stealthily using this channel. Our preliminary results show that the proposed channel is feasible and affects many popular USS, thus posing a practical threat to attackers.