TY - GEN
T1 - Covert Communications in a Dynamic Interference Environment
AU - Goeckel, Dennis
AU - Sheikholeslami, Azadeh
AU - Sobers, Tamara
AU - Bash, Boulat A.
AU - Towsley, Oon
AU - Guha, Saikat
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grants ECCS-1309573 and CNS-1564057, and by DARPA under contract number HR0011-16-C-0111.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 IEEE.
PY - 2018/8/24
Y1 - 2018/8/24
N2 - Much of security research focuses on preventing an adversary from deciphering a message's content, but there are a number of applications that motivate the more challenging goal of 'covert' communications: transmitter Alice conveying information to legitimate receiver Bob while preventing a capable and attentive adversary Willie from detecting the presence of the message. Willie detects Alice's transmission by looking for deviations from the background environment; hence, covert throughput can be increased if Willie has uncertainty about that background environment, as might be caused by user mobility or time-varying jamming. Here, we consider how the dynamics of the background environment impact the throughput of covert communications. Our previous work has shown that a background environment varying a constant number of times per codeword duration can greatly increase the covert throughput. In this paper, we consider the covert throughput for all potential rates of variation of the background. Neither extreme of variation is favorable to Alice: (1) when the background environment varies too quickly relative to the codeword length, Willie can average out the variation and hence limit Alice's covert throughput; (2) when the background environment varies too slowly, Willie can estimate the current environment and again limit Alice's covert throughput. We analyze a detector at Willie that provides an upper bound (converse) to the covert throughput of Alice for all potential rates of variation. Next, we provide an explicit construction for a scheme for Alice that provides a lower bound (achievability) on the covert throughput at each rate of variation.
AB - Much of security research focuses on preventing an adversary from deciphering a message's content, but there are a number of applications that motivate the more challenging goal of 'covert' communications: transmitter Alice conveying information to legitimate receiver Bob while preventing a capable and attentive adversary Willie from detecting the presence of the message. Willie detects Alice's transmission by looking for deviations from the background environment; hence, covert throughput can be increased if Willie has uncertainty about that background environment, as might be caused by user mobility or time-varying jamming. Here, we consider how the dynamics of the background environment impact the throughput of covert communications. Our previous work has shown that a background environment varying a constant number of times per codeword duration can greatly increase the covert throughput. In this paper, we consider the covert throughput for all potential rates of variation of the background. Neither extreme of variation is favorable to Alice: (1) when the background environment varies too quickly relative to the codeword length, Willie can average out the variation and hence limit Alice's covert throughput; (2) when the background environment varies too slowly, Willie can estimate the current environment and again limit Alice's covert throughput. We analyze a detector at Willie that provides an upper bound (converse) to the covert throughput of Alice for all potential rates of variation. Next, we provide an explicit construction for a scheme for Alice that provides a lower bound (achievability) on the covert throughput at each rate of variation.
KW - Covert communications
KW - decision theory
KW - wireless system security
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U2 - 10.1109/SPAWC.2018.8445896
DO - 10.1109/SPAWC.2018.8445896
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85053452175
SN - 9781538635124
T3 - IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications, SPAWC
BT - 2018 IEEE 19th International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications, SPAWC 2018
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 19th IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications, SPAWC 2018
Y2 - 25 June 2018 through 28 June 2018
ER -