Covert communication conceals transmission of messages from Alice to Bob out of a watchful adversary, Willie, who tries to determine if a transmission took place or not. While covert communication in a basic, vanilla setting where all variables are known to Willie, results in the well-known square-root law, when a jammer is present and assists Alice by creating uncertainty in Willie's decoder, a strictly positive transmission rate is possible.
In this work, we analyze the case where the jammer is equipped with multiple antennas. Specifically, we analyze the effect of multiple antennas at the jammer on Alice's transmission power and consequently on the transmission rate. We consider both cases, one in which the channel knowledge is known and one in which it is unknown by the jammer. We formulate several optimization problems for the transmission strategies of the jammer, to maximize his assistance to Alice, in terms of maximizing a ratio between Willie's and Bob's noise variances.
When the channel information is known to the jammer, we show that the optimal strategy of the jammer is to perform beamforming towards a single direction with all his available power. This direction though, is not trivial, since it reflects an optimal tradeoff point between minimizing the interference at Bob and maximizing the interference at Willie. When the channel knowledge is unknown, we show that the optimal strategy of the jammer is either to transmit isotropically to all directions or to the null-space of Bob, where this choice depends on certain channel conditions. This is in contrast to current schemes in the literature. Furthermore, we extend the optimization problems to the case where Bob is also equipped with multiple antennas, and provide insightful results, shown to be asymptotically optimal, accompanied by simulations.
This paper investigates the covert communications via cooperative jamming and relay selection in a wireless relay system, where a source intends to transmit a message to its destination with the help of a selected relay, and a warden attempts to detect the existence of wireless transmissions from both the source and relay, while friendly jammers send jamming signals to prevent warden from detecting the transmission process. To this end, we first propose two relay selection schemes, namely random relay selection (RRS) and max-min relay selection (MMRS), as well as their corresponding cooperativ…
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…
We consider that a transmitter covertly communicates with multiple receivers under the help of a friendly jammer. The messages intended for different receivers are transmitted in mutually orthogonal frequency bands. An adversary observes all these frequency bands aiming at detecting whether or not communication occurs, while the friendly jammer broadcasts jamming signals to degrade the detection performance of the adversary. We consider a block Rayleigh fading channel model and evaluate the performance of covert communication in two situations: 1) the wireless channels vary slowly such that th…
Covert communication hides the transmission of a message from a watchful adversary while ensuring reliable information decoding at the receiver, providing enhanced security in wireless communications. In this letter, covert communication in the presence of a multi-antenna adversary and under delay constraints is considered. Under the assumption of quasi-static wireless fading channels, we analyze the effect of increasing the number of antennas employed at the adversary on the achievable throughput of covert communication. It is shown that in contrast to a single-antenna adversary, a slight inc…
This paper studies multi-antenna-aided covert communications coexisting with randomly located wardens and interferers, considering both centralized and distributed antenna systems (CAS/DAS). The throughput performance of the covert communication is analyzed and optimized under a stochastic geometry framework, where the joint impact of the small-scale channel fading and the large-scale path loss is examined. To be specific, two probabilistic metrics, namely, the covert outage probability and the connectivity probability, are adopted to characterize the covertness and reliability of the transmis…
In this paper, we consider the issue of covert communications with random access protocol. We consider that the legitimate user Bob has no priori knowledge about packet arrival time and thus employs data-aided frame detection based on reference sequence. The warden user Willie tries to detect this covert communication by using a radiometer. The detection performance analysis is provided for both Bob and Willie under Rayleigh fading channel. It is demonstrated that the covert performance can benefit from the increase of the frame length or the number of receive antennas from frame detection per…
This work employs an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a jammer to aid a covert communication from a transmitter Alice to a receiver Bob, where the UAV transmits artificial noise (AN) with random power to deliberately create interference to a warden Willie. In the considered system, the UAV's trajectory is critical to the covert communication performance, since the AN transmitted by the UAV also generates interference to Bob. To maximize the system performance, we formulate an optimization problem to jointly design the UAV's trajectory and Alice's transmit power. The formulated optimization pro…
Second-Order Asymptotics for Covert Communication over Quasi-Static Multiple-Antenna Fading Channels
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；School of Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing, Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学自动化与智能制造学院）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA) is a robust multiple access scheme for downlink multi-antenna wireless networks. In this work, we investigate a novel application of RSMA for joint communications and jamming with a Multi-Carrier (MC) waveform in Multiple Input Single Output (MISO) Broadcast Channel (BC). Our aim is to simultaneously communicate with Information Users (IU) and jam Adversarial Users (AU) to disrupt their communications in a setting where all users perform broadband communications by MC waveforms in their respective networks. We consider the practical setting of imperfect CS…
Surveillance performance is studied for a wireless eavesdropping system, where a full-duplex legitimate monitor eavesdrops a suspicious link efficiently with the artificial noise (AN) assistance. Different from the existing work in the literature, the suspicious receiver in this paper is assumed to be capable of detecting the presence of AN. Once such receiver detects the AN, the suspicious user will stop transmission, which is harmful for the surveillance performance. Hence, to improve the surveillance performance, AN should be transmitted covertly with a low detection probability by the susp…
In this paper, we investigate covert communication over millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies. In particular, a dual-beam mmWave transmitter, comprised of two independent antenna arrays, attempts to reliably communicate to a receiver Bob when hiding the existence of transmission from a warden Willie. In this regard, operating over mmWave bands not only increases the covertness thanks to directional beams, but also increases the transmission data rates given much more available bandwidths and enables ultra-low form factor transceivers due to the lower wavelengths used compared to the conventiona…
In this paper, we study the problem of secure transmission with covert requirement in untrusted relaying networks. Our considered system model consists of one source, one destination, one untrusted relay, and one Willie. The untrusted relay tries to extract the information signal, while the goal of Willie is to detect the presence of the information signal transmitted by the source, in the current time slot. To overcome these two attacks, we illustrate that the destination and the source should inject jamming signal to the network in phase I and phase II, respectively. Accordingly, the communi…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted a lot of research attention because of their high mobility and low cost in serving as temporary aerial base stations (BSs) and providing high data rates for next-generation communication networks. To protect user privacy while avoiding detection by a warden, we investigate a jammer-aided UAV covert communication system, which aims to maximize the user's covert rate with optimized transmit and jamming power. The UAV is equipped with multi-antennas to serve multi-users simultaneously and enhance the Quality of Service. By considering the general com…
Covert transmission is studied for an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided communication system, where Alice aims to transmit messages to Bob without being detected by the warden Willie. Specifically, an IRS is used to increase the data rate at Bob under a covert constraint. For the considered model, when Alice is equipped with a single antenna, the transmission power at Alice and phase shifts at the IRS are jointly optimized to maximize the covert transmission rate with either instantaneous or partial channel state information (CSI) of Willie's link. In addition, when multiple antennas …
With the increasing number of wireless communication systems and the demand for bandwidth, the wireless medium has become a congested and contested environment. Operating under such an environment brings several challenges, especially for military communication systems, which need to guarantee reliable communication while avoiding interfering with other friendly or neutral systems and denying the enemy systems of service. In this work, we investigate a novel application of Rate-Splitting Multiple Access(RSMA) for joint communications and jamming with a Multi-Carrier(MC) waveform in a multiante…
Transmitter-side channel state information (CSI) of the legitimate destination plays a critical role in physical layer secure transmissions. However, channel training procedure is vulnerable to the pilot spoofing attack (PSA) or pilot jamming attack (PJA) by an active eavesdropper (Eve), which inevitably results in severe private information leakage. In this paper, we propose a random channel training (RCT) based secure downlink transmission framework for a time division duplex (TDD) multiple antennas base station (BS). In the proposed RCT scheme, multiple orthogonal pilot sequences (PSs) are …
We consider covert communication, i.e., hiding the presence of communication from an adversary for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. We characterize the maximum covert coding rate under a variety of settings, including different regimes where either the number of transmit antennas or the blocklength is scaled up. We show that a non-zero covert capacity can be achieved in the massive MIMO regime in which the number of transmit antennas scales up but under specific conditions. Under such conditions, we show that the covert capacity of MIMO AWGN …
Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications（重庆邮电大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）
In this paper, we investigate the artificial noise-aided jamming design for a transmitter equipped with large antenna array in Rician fading channels. We figure out that when the number of transmit antennas tends to infinity, whether the secrecy outage happens in a Rician channel depends on the geometric locations of eavesdroppers. In this light, we first define and analytically describe the secrecy outage region (SOR), indicating all possible locations of an eavesdropper that can cause secrecy outage. After that, the secrecy outage probability (SOP) is derived, and a jamming-beneficial range,…
We consider the problem of secure communications in a MIMO setting in the presence of an adversarial jammer equipped with $n_j$ transmit antennas and an eavesdropper equipped with $n_e$ receive antennas. A multiantenna transmitter, equipped with $n_t$ antennas, desires to secretly communicate a message to a multiantenna receiver equipped with $n_r$ antennas. We propose a transmission method based on artificial noise and linear precoding and a two-stage receiver method employing beamforming. Under this strategy, we first characterize the achievable secrecy rates of communication and prove that …
This paper considers the physical layer security of a pilot-based massive multiple-input multiple-output (MaMIMO) system in presence of a multi-antenna jammer. To improve security of the network, we propose a new jamming detection method that makes use of a generalized likelihood ratio test over some coherence blocks. Our proposed method utilizes intentionally unused pilots in the network. The performance of the proposed detector improves by increasing the number of antennas at the base station, the number of unused pilots and also by the number of the coherence blocks that are utilized. Simul…
In this paper, we study the benefits of full-duplex (FD) receiver jamming in enhancing the physical-layer security of a two-tier decentralized wireless network with each tier deployed with a large number of pairs of a single-antenna transmitter and a multi-antenna receiver. In the underlying tier, the transmitter sends unclassified information, and the receiver works in the halfduplex (HD) mode receiving the desired signal. In the overlaid tier, the transmitter deliveries confidential information in the presence of randomly located eavesdroppers, and the receiver works in the FD mode radiating…
This paper studies secrecy rate optimization in a wireless network with a single-antenna source, a multi-antenna destination and a multi-antenna eavesdropper. This is an unfavorable scenario for secrecy performance as the system is interference-limited. In the literature, assuming that the receiver operates in half duplex (HD) mode, the aforementioned problem has been addressed via use of cooperating nodes who act as jammers to confound the eavesdropper. This paper investigates an alternative solution, which assumes the availability of a full duplex (FD) receiver. In particular, while receivin…
To improve national security, government agencies have long been committed to enforcing powerful surveillance measures on suspicious individuals or communications. In this paper, we consider a wireless legitimate surveillance system, where a full-duplex multi-antenna legitimate monitor aims to eavesdrop on a dubious communication link between a suspicious pair via proactive jamming. Assuming that the legitimate monitor can successfully overhear the suspicious information only when its achievable data rate is no smaller than that of the suspicious receiver, the key objective is to maximize the …
In this paper, we model a complete-information zero-sum game between a centralized detection network with a multiple access channel (MAC) between the sensors and the fusion center (FC), and a jammer with multiple transmitting antennas. We choose error probability at the FC as the performance metric, and investigate pure strategy equilibria for this game, and show that the jammer has no impact on the FC's error probability by employing pure strategies at the Nash equilibrium. Furthermore, we also show that the jammer has an impact on the expected utility if it employs mixed strategies.
We consider a Gaussian MISO wiretap channel, where a multi-antenna source communicates with a single-antenna destination in the presence of a single-antenna eavesdropper. The communication is assisted by multi-antenna helpers that act as jammers to the eavesdropper. Each helper independently transmits noise which lies in the null space of the channel to the destination, thus creates no interference to the destination. Under the assumption that there is eavesdropper channel uncertainty, we derive the optimal covariance matrix for the source signal so that the secrecy rate is maximized subject t…
Suppose that a transmitter Alice potentially wishes to communicate with a receiver Bob over an adversarially jammed binary channel. An active adversary James eavesdrops on their communication over a binary symmetric channel (BSC(q)), and may maliciously flip (up to) a certain fraction p of their transmitted bits based on his observations. We consider a setting where the communication must be simultaneously covert as well as reliable, i.e., James should be unable to accurately distinguish whether or not Alice is communicating, while Bob should be able to correctly recover Alice's message with h…
Exploiting UAV Attitude for Covert Communications: Dynamics-Consistent Trajectory-Attitude Co-Design
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications（重庆邮电大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
Fundamental limits of covert communication have been studied in literature for different models of scalar channels. It was shown that, over $n$ independent channel uses, $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{n})$ bits can transmitted reliably over a public channel while achieving an arbitrarily low probability of detection (LPD) by other stations. This result is well known as square-root law and even to achieve this diminishing rate of covert communication, some form of shared secret is needed between the transmitter and the receiver. In this paper, we establish the limits of LPD communication over the MIMO AWGN…
A wireless communication network is considered, consisting of a source (Alice), a destination (Bob) and an eavesdropper (Eve), each equipped with a single antenna. The communication is assisted by multiple helpers, each equipped with two antennas, which implement cooperative jamming, i.e., transmitting noise to confound Eve. The optimal structure of the jamming noise that maximizes the secrecy rate is derived. A nulling noise scenario is also considered, in which each helper transmits noise that nulls out at Bob. Each helper only requires knowledge of its own link to Bob to determine the noise…
Linear precoding and cooperative jamming for multiuser broadcast channel is studied to enhance the physical layer security. We consider the system where multiple independent data streams are transmitted from the base station to multiple legitimate users with the help of a friendly jammer. It is assumed that a normalized linear precoding matrix is given at the base station, whereas the power allocated to each user is to be determined. The problem is to jointly design the power allocation across different users for linear precoding and the cooperative jamming at the friendly jammer. The goal is …
We study a backscatter communication protocol over a AWGN channel, where a transmitter illuminates a tag with a directional multi-antenna. The tag performs load modulation on the signal while hiding its physical presence from a warden. We show that, if the transmitter-to-tag channel is inaccessible to the warden, then $Θ(n)$ reliable and covert bits can be transmitted over $n$ channel usages. This overcomes the square-root law for covert communication. This paper provides the first evidence for practical implementation of covert backscatter communication, with potential applications in IoT sec…
In this paper, we investigate covert communication over millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies. In particular, a mmWave transmitter, referred to as Alice, attempts to reliably communicate to a receiver, referred to as Bob, while hiding the existence of communication from a warden, referred to as Willie. In this regard, operating over the mmWave bands not only increases the covertness thanks to directional beams, but also increases the transmission data rates given much more available bandwidths and enables ultra-low form factor transceivers due to the lower wavelengths used compared to the conve…
In this work, we consider an advanced noise reduction differential chaotic shift keying (NR-DCSK) system in which a single antenna source communicates with a single antenna destination under the attack of a single antenna jammer. We devote our efforts to design a novel anti-jamming (AJ) receiver for the considered system. Particularly, we propose a variational mode decomposition-independent component analysis-wavelet packet decomposition-based (VMD-ICA-WPD-based) structure, in which the VMD method is firstly exploited to generate multiple signals from the single received one. Secondly, the ICA…
This paper explores the role of multiple antennas in mitigating jamming attacks for the Rayleigh fading environment with exogenous random traffic arrival. The jammer is assumed to have energy harvesting ability where energy arrives according to Bernoulli process. The outage probabilities are derived with different assumptions on the number of antennas at the transmitter and receiver. The outage probability for the Alamouti space-time code is also derived. The work characterizes the average service rate for different antenna configurations taking into account of random arrival of data and energ…
This correspondence studies the secrecy communication of the single-input single-output multi-eavesdropper (SISOME) channel with multiple single-antenna jammers, where the jammers and eavesdroppers are distributed according to the independent two-dimensional homogeneous Poisson point process (PPP). For enhancing the physical layer security, we propose an opportunistic multiple jammer selection scheme, where the jammers whose channel gains to the legitimate receiver less than a threshold, are selected to transmit independent and identically distributed (\emph{i.i.d.}) Gaussian jamming signals t…
This paper investigates reliable and covert transmission strategies in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channel with a transmitter, receiver and an adversarial wiretapper, each equipped with multiple antennas. In a departure from existing work, the wiretapper possesses a novel capability to act either as a passive eavesdropper or as an active jammer, under a half-duplex constraint. The transmitter therefore faces a choice between allocating all of its power for data, or broadcasting artificial interference along with the information signal in an attempt to jam the eavesdropper (…
We consider uplink transmission of a massive multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) system in the presence of a smart jammer. The jammer aims to degrade the sum spectral efficiency of the legitimate system by attacking both the training and data transmission phases. First, we derive a closed-form expression for the sum spectral efficiency by taking into account the presence of a smart jammer. Then, we determine how a jammer with a given energy budget should attack the training and data transmission phases to induce the maximum loss to the sum spectral efficiency. Numerical results…
In this paper, we study the problem of physical layer security in the uplink of millimeter-wave massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) networks and propose a jamming detection and suppression method. The proposed method is based on directional information of the received signals at the base station antenna array. The proposed jamming detection method can accurately detect both the existence and direction of the jammer using the received pilot signals in the training phase. The obtained information is then exploited to develop a channel estimator that excludes the jammer's angular subspa…
We investigate a relay network where the source can potentially utilize an untrusted non-regenerative relay to augment its direct transmission of a confidential message to the destination. Since the relay is untrusted, it is desirable to protect the confidential data from it while simultaneously making use of it to increase the reliability of the transmission. We first examine the secrecy outage probability (SOP) of the network assuming a single antenna relay, and calculate the exact SOP for three different schemes: direct transmission without using the relay, conventional non-regenerative rel…
Anti-Jamming Sensing with Distributed Reconfigurable Intelligent Metasurface Antennas
School of Information and Communications Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（信息与通信工程学院，西安交通大学）；Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Intelligent Networks and Network Security, Xi’an Jiaotong University（教育部智能网络与网络安全重点实验室，西安交通大学）
We investigate the secure degrees of freedom (SDoF) of a two-transmitter Gaussian multiple access channel with multiple antennas at the transmitters, the legitimate receiver with the existence of an unknown number of eavesdroppers each with a number of antennas less than or equal to a known value $N_E$. The channel matrices between the legitimate transmitters and the receiver are available everywhere, while the legitimate pair does not know the eavesdroppers' channels matrices. We provide the exact sum SDoF for the considered system. A new comprehensive upperbound is deduced and a new achievab…
