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IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW)

An Extensible Covert Communication Scheme Over the AWGN Channel With Feedback

Hangmei Rao, Ligong Wang

Published Nov 1, 2022• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

We consider a problem of communication over a physically-degraded additive white Gaussian noise wiretap channel. A covertness constraint is imposed, which says that the output at the wiretapper must statistically resemble pure noise. Previous works have shown that the total amount of information that can be transmitted over n uses of the channel is proportional to n, but the communication schemes in those works are designed to transmit only one message of predetermined length. We propose a feedback-aided scheme that, at the cost of less-than-optimal message length, is easily extensible to transmitting multiple messages and an unbounded amount of information.

DOI
10.1109/itw54588.2022.9965789

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We consider a problem of communication over a physically-degraded additive white Gaussian noise wiretap channel. A covertness constraint is imposed, which says that the output at the wiretapper must statistically resemble pure noise. Previous works have shown that the total amount of information that can be transmitted over n uses of the channel is proportional to n, but the communication schemes in those works are designed to transmit only one message of predetermined length. We propose a feedback-aided scheme that, at the cost of less-than-optimal message length, is easily extensible to transmitting multiple messages and an unbounded amount of information.
We consider a problem of communication over a continuous-time additive Gaussian noise channel. A covertness constraint is imposed on the communication protocol, which says that the channel output must statistically resemble pure noise. When there is no bandwidth constraint on the input, we argue that the covert communication capacity of this channel is positive, in contrast to the band-limited case where covertness requires that the amount of transmission grow at most like the square root of total communication time. This claim is formally proven in the case where the Gaussian noise is white with respect to the bandwidth used by the transmitter.
The concept of the wiretap channel was first proposed by Wyner. He considered the case in which data is to be transmitted reliably over a discrete memoryless main channel to a legitimate receiver. The wiretapper views the output of the main channel through another discrete memoryless channel. It is assumed that the wiretapper knows the code being used and his only handicap is the additional noise in his signal. The problem is to maximize the transmission rate R to the legitimate receiver and the equivocation d of the wiretapper. In this dissertation, the additive white Gaussian noise wiretap channel is introduced and the set of all achievable (R,d) pairs is determined explicitly through the use of certain special properties of the Gaussian channel. Some useful characterizations of a special class of wiretap channels are also explored. A model of the wiretap channel with feedback is proposed. It turns out that with the introduction of feedback, even when the main channel is inferior to the wiretapper's channel, it is still possible to reliably communicate with the legitimate receiver in complete secrecy. The binary erasure wiretap channel with feedback is examined and inner and outer bounds on the achievable (R,d) region are given. Finally, a scheme for enlarging the capacity region of multiple-access channels using feedback is analyzed. It is shown that conditions under which an enlargement is possible are fairly weak, indicating that feedback can almost increase the capacity region. (Author)
We consider the problem of covert communication over a state-dependent channel, where the transmitter has causal or noncausal knowledge of the channel states. Here, covert means that a warden on the channel should observe similar statistics when the transmitter is sending a message and when it is not. When a sufficiently long secret key is shared between the transmitter and the receiver, we derive closed-form formulas for the maximum achievable covert communication rate (covert capacity) for discrete memoryless channels and, when the transmitter's channel-state information (CSI) is noncausal, for additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. For certain channel models, including the AWGN channel, we show that the covert capacity is positive with CSI at the transmitter, but is zero without CSI. We also derive lower bounds on the rate of the secret key that is needed for the transmitter and the receiver to achieve the covert capacity.
In this paper, we study delay-intolerant covert communications in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels with a finite block length, i.e., a finite number of channel uses. Considering the maximum allowable number of channel uses to be N, it is not immediately clear whether the actual number of channel uses, denoted by n, should be as large as N or smaller for covert communications. This is because a smaller n reduces a warden's chance to detect the communications due to fewer observations, but also reduces the chance to transmit information. We show that n = N is indeed optimal to maximize the amount of information bits that can be transmitted, subject to any covert communication constraint in terms of the warden's detection error probability. To better make use of the warden's uncertainty due to the finite block length, we also propose to use uniformly distributed random transmit power to enhance covert communications. Our examination shows that the amount of information that can be covertly transmitted logarithmically increases with the number of random power levels, which indicates that most of the benefit of using random transmit power is achieved with just a few different power levels.
Recent work has established that when transmitter Alice wishes to communicate reliably to recipient Bob without detection by warden Willie, with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels between all parties, communication is limited to O(n)\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{n})O(n​) bits in nnn channel uses. However, this assumes Willie has an accurate statistical characterization of the channel. When Willie has uncertainty about such and his receiver is limited to a threshold test on the received power, Alice can transmit covertly with a power that does not decrease with nnn, thus conveying O(n)\mathcal{O}(n)O(n) bits covertly and reliably in nnn uses of an AWGN channel. Here, we consider covert communication of O(n)\mathcal{O}(n)O(n) bits in nnn channel uses while generalizing the environment and removing any restrictions on Willie's receiver. We assume an uninformed "jammer" is present to help Alice, and we consider AWGN and block fading channels. In some scenarios, Willie's optimal detector is a threshold test on the received power. When the channel between the jammer and Willie has multiple fading blocks per codeword, a threshold test on the received power is not optimal. However, we establish that Alice can remain covert with a transmit power that does not decrease with nnn even when Willie employs an optimal detector.
The problem of covert communication over Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channels is investigated, in which a transmitter attempts to reliably communicate with a legitimate receiver while avoiding detection by a passive adversary. The covert capacity of the MIMO AWGN channel is characterized under a variational distance covertness constraint when the MIMO channel matrices are static and known. The characterization of the covert capacity is also extended to a class of channels in which the legitimate channel matrix is known but the adversary’s channel matrix is only known up to a rank and a spectral norm constraint.