Giménez Aguilar, María del MarFuentes García-Romero de Tejada, José María deGonzález Manzano, LorenaCámara Núñez, María Carmen2021-12-032021-12-032021-09-01M. Gimenez-Aguilar, J. M. De Fuentes, L. González-Manzano and C. Camara, "Zephyrus: An Information Hiding Mechanism Leveraging Ethereum Data Fields," in IEEE Access, vol. 9, pp. 118553-118570, 2021, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3106713.2169-3536https://hdl.handle.net/10016/33719Permanent availability makes blockchain technologies a suitable alternative for building a covert channel. Previous works have analysed its feasibility in a particular blockchain technology called Bitcoin. However, Ethereum cryptocurrency is gaining momentum as a means to build distributed apps. The novelty of this paper relies on the use of Ethereum to establish a covert channel considering all transaction fields and smart contracts. No previous work has explored this issue. Thus, a mechanism called Zephyrus, an information hiding mechanism based on steganography, is developed. Moreover, its capacity, cost and stealthiness are assessed both theoretically, and empirically through a prototype implementation that is publicly released. Disregarding the time taken to send the transaction to the blockchain, its retrieval and the mining time, experimental results show that, in the best case, 40 Kbits can be embedded in 0.57 s. for US$ 1.64, and retrieved in 2.8 seng© The Authors, 2021Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 3.0 Españaetheruminformation hidingsteganographyblockchainresearch articleInformáticahttps://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3106713open access118553118570IEEE Access9AR/0000028718