No Arabic abstract
Covert wireless communication or low probability of detection (LPD) communication that employs the noise or jamming signals as the cover to hide users information can prevent a warden Willie from discovering users transmission attempts. Previous work on this problem has typically assumed that the warden is static and has only one antenna, often neglecting an active warden who can dynamically adjust his/her location to make better statistic tests. In this paper, we analyze the effect of an active warden in covert wireless communications on AWGN channels and find that, having gathered samples at different places, the warden can easily detect Alices transmission behavior via a trend test, and the square root law is invalid in this scenario. Furthermore, a more powerful warden with multiple antennas is harder to be deceived, and Willies detection time can be greatly shortened.
In this paper, we study covert communications between {a pair of} legitimate transmitter-receiver against a watchful warden over slow fading channels. There coexist multiple friendly helper nodes who are willing to protect the covert communication from being detected by the warden. We propose an uncoordinated jammer selection scheme where those helpers whose instantaneous channel gains to the legitimate receiver fall below a pre-established selection threshold will be chosen as jammers radiating jamming signals to defeat the warden. By doing so, the detection accuracy of the warden is expected to be severely degraded while the desired covert communication is rarely affected. We then jointly design the optimal selection threshold and message transmission rate for maximizing covert throughput under the premise that the detection error of the warden exceeds a certain level. Numerical results are presented to validate our theoretical analyses. It is shown that the multi-jammer assisted covert communication outperforms the conventional single-jammer method in terms of covert throughput, and the maximal covert throughput improves significantly as the total number of helpers increases, which demonstrates the validity and superiority of our proposed scheme.
Covert communications enable a transmitter to send information reliably in the presence of an adversary, who looks to detect whether the transmission took place or not. We consider covert communications over quasi-static block fading channels, where users suffer from channel uncertainty. We investigate the adversary Willies optimal detection performance in two extreme cases, i.e., the case of perfect channel state information (CSI) and the case of channel distribution information (CDI) only. It is shown that in the large detection error regime, Willies detection performances of these two cases are essentially indistinguishable, which implies that the quality of CSI does not help Willie in improving his detection performance. This result enables us to study the covert transmission design without the need to factor in the exact amount of channel uncertainty at Willie. We then obtain the optimal and suboptimal closed-form solution to the covert transmission design. Our result reveals fundamental difference in the design between the case of quasi-static fading channel and the previously studied case of non-fading AWGN channel.
In this paper, we investigate the optimal design of a wireless-powered covert communication (WP-CC) system, in which a probabilistic accumulate-then-transmit (ATT) protocol is proposed to maximize the communication covertness subject to a quality-of-service (QoS) requirement on communication. Specifically, in the considered WP-CC system, a full-duplex (FD) receiver transmits artificial noise (AN) to simultaneously charge an energy-constrained transmitter and to confuse a wardens detection on the transmitters communication activity. With the probabilistic ATT protocol, the transmitter sends its information with a prior probability, i.e., $p$, conditioned on the available energy being sufficient. Our analysis shows that the probabilistic ATT protocol can achieve higher covertness than the traditional ATT protocol with $p=1$. In order to facilitate the optimal design of the WP-CC system, we also derive the wardens minimum detection error probability and characterize the effective covert rate from the transmitter to the receiver to quantify the communication covertness and quality, respectively. The derived analytical results facilitate the joint optimization of the probability $p$ and the information transmit power. We further present the optimal design of a cable-powered covert communication (CP-CC) system as a benchmark for comparison. Our simulation shows that the proposed probabilistic ATT protocol (with a varying $p$) can achieve the covertness upper bound determined by the CP-CC system, while the traditional ATT protocol (with $p=1$) cannot, which again confirms the benefits brought by the proposed probabilistic ATT in covert communications.
CSI (Channel State Information) of WiFi systems contains the environment channel response between the transmitter and the receiver, so the people/objects and their movement in between can be sensed. To get CSI, the receiver performs channel estimation based on the pre-known training field of the transmitted WiFi signal. CSI related technology is useful in many cases, but it also brings concerns on privacy and security. In this paper, we open sourced a CSI fuzzer to enhance the privacy and security of WiFi CSI applications. It is built and embedded into the transmitter of openwifi, which is an open source full-stack WiFi chip design, to prevent unauthorized sensing without sacrificing the WiFi link performance. The CSI fuzzer imposes an artificial channel response to the signal before it is transmitted, so the CSI seen by the receiver will indicate the actual channel response combined with the artificial response. Only the authorized receiver, that knows the artificial response, can calculate the actual channel response and perform the CSI sensing. Another potential application of the CSI fuzzer is covert channels based on a set of pre-defined artificial response patterns. Our work resolves the pain point of implementing the anti-sensing idea based on the commercial off-the-shelf WiFi devices.
This paper jointly optimizes the flying location and wireless communication transmit power for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) conducting covert operations. This is motivated by application scenarios such as military ground surveillance from airborne platforms, where it is vital for a UAVs signal transmission to be undetectable by those within the surveillance region. Specifically, we maximize the communication quality to a legitimate ground receiver outside the surveillance region, subject to: a covertness constraint, a maximum transmit power constraint, and a physical location constraint determined by the required surveillance quality. We provide an explicit solution to the optimization problem for one of the most practical constraint combinations. For other constraint combinations, we determine feasible regions for flight, that can then be searched to establish the UAVs optimal location. In many cases, the 2-dimensional optimal location is achieved by a 1-dimensional search. We discuss two heuristic approaches to UAV placement, and show that in some cases they are able to achieve close to optimal, but that in other cases significant gains can be achieved by employing our developed solutions.