Covert communications when the warden does not know the background noise power

Dennis Goeckel; Boulat Bash; Saikat Guha; Don Towsley

doi:10.1109/LCOMM.2015.2507594

Covert communications when the warden does not know the background noise power

Dennis Goeckel, Boulat Bash, Saikat Guha, Don Towsley

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

81 Scopus citations

Abstract

If the warden Willie attempting to detect the transmission knows the statistics of his receiver noise, Alice can transmit no more than O(√n) covert bits reliably to Bob in n channel uses of an AWGN channel. However, if Willie does not know his noise statistics exactly, Alice can covertly transmit O(n) bits. In this letter, Willie lacks knowledge of his channel statistics but observes T(n) length-n codeword slots, where some number may be used by Alice to attempt covert transmission. We show that Willie can often limit Alice to the same performance scaling as when he knows his channel statistics.

Original language	English (US)
Article number	2507594
Pages (from-to)	236-239
Number of pages	4
Journal	IEEE Communications Letters
Volume	20
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1109/LCOMM.2015.2507594
State	Published - Feb 1 2016

Keywords

Digital communication, signal detection, security

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Modeling and Simulation
Computer Science Applications
Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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10.1109/LCOMM.2015.2507594

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abstract = "If the warden Willie attempting to detect the transmission knows the statistics of his receiver noise, Alice can transmit no more than O(√n) covert bits reliably to Bob in n channel uses of an AWGN channel. However, if Willie does not know his noise statistics exactly, Alice can covertly transmit O(n) bits. In this letter, Willie lacks knowledge of his channel statistics but observes T(n) length-n codeword slots, where some number may be used by Alice to attempt covert transmission. We show that Willie can often limit Alice to the same performance scaling as when he knows his channel statistics.",

keywords = "Digital communication, signal detection, security",

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AU - Guha, Saikat

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N2 - If the warden Willie attempting to detect the transmission knows the statistics of his receiver noise, Alice can transmit no more than O(√n) covert bits reliably to Bob in n channel uses of an AWGN channel. However, if Willie does not know his noise statistics exactly, Alice can covertly transmit O(n) bits. In this letter, Willie lacks knowledge of his channel statistics but observes T(n) length-n codeword slots, where some number may be used by Alice to attempt covert transmission. We show that Willie can often limit Alice to the same performance scaling as when he knows his channel statistics.

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Covert communications when the warden does not know the background noise power

Abstract

Keywords

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