Covert Communication Over Additive-Noise Channels

Abstract

We study the fundamental limits of covert communications over general memoryless additive-noise channels. We assume that the legitimate receiver and the eavesdropper share the same channel and therefore see the same outputs. Under mild integrability assumptions, we find a general upper bound on the square-root scaling constant, which only involves the variance of the logarithm of the probability density function of the noise. Furthermore, we show that, under some additional assumptions, this upper bound is tight. We also provide upper bounds on the length of the secret key required to achieve the optimal scaling.