The purpose of the covert communication scheme is to conceal the communication behavior entirely.In such schemes,the sender and receiver rely on secret keys to establish a covert channel.However,conventional key excha...The purpose of the covert communication scheme is to conceal the communication behavior entirely.In such schemes,the sender and receiver rely on secret keys to establish a covert channel.However,conventional key exchange protocols would expose the key exchange process between them.An adversary who observes the key exchange would be aware of the existence of communication behavior.The keys used in covert communication are not suitable to be generated through conventional key exchange schemes.To address this,we propose a blockchain-based covert elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange scheme(BCDH)to conceal the process of the key exchange in blockchain transactions.Following a straightforward setup,BCDH allows the sender and receiver to covertly exchange a secret key on a blockchain without direct communication.Furthermore,we expand the BCDH approach to operate across multiple blockchains,further enhancing its covertness and stability.We analyze BCDH from several perspectives,including covertness,security,randomness,etc.Additionally,we implement a prototype of BCDH on the Ethereum platform to assess its feasibility and performance.Our evaluation demonstrates that BCDH is efficient and well-suited for real-world applications.展开更多
In covert communications,joint jammer selection and power optimization are important to improve performance.However,existing schemes usually assume a warden with a known location and perfect Channel State Information(...In covert communications,joint jammer selection and power optimization are important to improve performance.However,existing schemes usually assume a warden with a known location and perfect Channel State Information(CSI),which is difficult to achieve in practice.To be more practical,it is important to investigate covert communications against a warden with uncertain locations and imperfect CSI,which makes it difficult for legitimate transceivers to estimate the detection probability of the warden.First,the uncertainty caused by the unknown warden location must be removed,and the Optimal Detection Position(OPTDP)of the warden is derived which can provide the best detection performance(i.e.,the worst case for a covert communication).Then,to further avoid the impractical assumption of perfect CSI,the covert throughput is maximized using only the channel distribution information.Given this OPTDP based worst case for covert communications,the jammer selection,the jamming power,the transmission power,and the transmission rate are jointly optimized to maximize the covert throughput(OPTDP-JP).To solve this coupling problem,a Heuristic algorithm based on Maximum Distance Ratio(H-MAXDR)is proposed to provide a sub-optimal solution.First,according to the analysis of the covert throughput,the node with the maximum distance ratio(i.e.,the ratio of the distances from the jammer to the receiver and that to the warden)is selected as the friendly jammer(MAXDR).Then,the optimal transmission and jamming power can be derived,followed by the optimal transmission rate obtained via the bisection method.In numerical and simulation results,it is shown that although the location of the warden is unknown,by assuming the OPTDP of the warden,the proposed OPTDP-JP can always satisfy the covertness constraint.In addition,with an uncertain warden and imperfect CSI,the covert throughput provided by OPTDP-JP is 80%higher than the existing schemes when the covertness constraint is 0.9,showing the effectiveness of OPTDP-JP.展开更多
Watermarking is embedding visible or invisible data within media to verify its authenticity or protect copyright.The watermark is embedded in significant spatial or frequency features of the media to make it more resi...Watermarking is embedding visible or invisible data within media to verify its authenticity or protect copyright.The watermark is embedded in significant spatial or frequency features of the media to make it more resistant to intentional or unintentional modification.Some of these features are important perceptual features according to the human visual system(HVS),which means that the embedded watermark should be imperceptible in these features.Therefore,both the designers of watermarking algorithms and potential attackers must consider these perceptual features when carrying out their actions.The two roles will be considered in this paper when designing a robust watermarking algorithm against the most harmful attacks,like volumetric scaling,histogram equalization,and non-conventional watermarking attacks like the Denoising Convolution Neural Network(DnCNN),which must be considered in watermarking algorithm design due to its rising role in the state-of-the-art attacks.The DnCNN is initialized and trained using watermarked image samples created by our proposed Covert and Severe Attacks Resistant Watermarking Algorithm(CSRWA)to prove its robustness.For this algorithm to satisfy the robustness and imperceptibility tradeoff,implementing the Dither Modulation(DM)algorithm is boosted by utilizing the Just Noticeable Distortion(JND)principle to get an improved performance in this sense.Sensitivity,luminance,inter and intra-block contrast are used to adjust the JND values.展开更多
This paper investigates the reconfigurable intelligent surface(RIS)-aided MIMO covert communications in high-speed railway(HSR)scenario.In the scenario,RIS controls the phases of reflection elements dynamically to sen...This paper investigates the reconfigurable intelligent surface(RIS)-aided MIMO covert communications in high-speed railway(HSR)scenario.In the scenario,RIS controls the phases of reflection elements dynamically to send the signal in the desired direction,which facilitates the covert communication between base station(BS)and train mobile relay(MR)in the existence of a watchful warden(Willie).To protect the desired transmission,it is assumed that MR sends out jamming signals with a varying power to confuse the Willie.Considering the Doppler spread caused by the time-varying wireless channel,the joint optimization problem of the BS beamforming matrix,MR beamforming matrix,and the RIS phase shifts is established to maximize the covert throughput.An alternating optimization(AO)method for handling non convex problems is proposed based on coupling effects and the constraints of constant modulus,and a semidefinite relaxation method is provided.Finally,we achieve the optimal solutions of the multi-objective optimization problem by interior-point method.The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm exhibits the superior robustness and covert performances in high-speed railway scenarios.展开更多
Blockchain,as a distributed ledger,inherently possesses tamper-resistant capabilities,creating a natural channel for covert communication.However,the immutable nature of data storage might introduce challenges to comm...Blockchain,as a distributed ledger,inherently possesses tamper-resistant capabilities,creating a natural channel for covert communication.However,the immutable nature of data storage might introduce challenges to communication security.This study introduces a blockchain-based covert communication model utilizing dynamic Base-K encoding.The proposed encoding scheme utilizes the input address sequence to determine K to encode the secret message and determines the order of transactions based on K,thus ensuring effective concealment of the message.The dynamic encoding parameters enhance flexibility and address issues related to identical transaction amounts for the same secret message.Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method maintains smooth communication and low susceptibility to tampering,achieving commendable concealment and embedding rates.展开更多
With the widespread application of com-munication technology in the non-terrestrial network(NTN),the issue of the insecure communication due to the inherent openness of the NTN is increasingly being recognized.Consequ...With the widespread application of com-munication technology in the non-terrestrial network(NTN),the issue of the insecure communication due to the inherent openness of the NTN is increasingly being recognized.Consequently,safeguarding com-munication information in the NTN has emerged as a critical challenge.To address this issue,we pro-pose a beamforming and horizontal trajectory joint op-timization method for unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)covert communications in the NTN.First,we formu-late an optimization problem that considers constraints such as the transmitting power and the distance.More-over,we employ the integrated communication and jamming(ICAJ)signal as Alice’s transmitting signal,further protecting the content of communication in-formation.Next,we construct two subproblems,and we propose an alternate optimization(AO)algorithm based on quadratic transform and penalty term method to solve the proposed two subproblems.Simulation re-sults demonstrate that the proposed method is effective and has better performance than benchmarks.展开更多
In this paper,we investigate covert communications under multi-antenna detection,and explore the impacts of the warden’s channel state information(CSI)availability and the noise uncertainty on system covert capabilit...In this paper,we investigate covert communications under multi-antenna detection,and explore the impacts of the warden’s channel state information(CSI)availability and the noise uncertainty on system covert capability.The detection performance at warden is analyzed in two cases under the perfect and statistical CSI at warden,respectively.In particular,for the former one,the warden utilizes the likelihood ratio(LR)detector,while for the latter one,the generalized likelihood ratio(GLR)detector is adopted.We first consider the scenario where the blocklength is finite,and demonstrate that the covert rate under both cases asymptotically goes to zero as the blocklength goes to infinity.Subsequently,we take the noise uncertainty at the warden into account which leads to positive covert rate,and characterize the covert rate for infinite blocklength.Specially,we derive the optimal transmit power for the legitimate transmitter that maximizes the covert rate.Besides,the rate gap under two cases,with different CSI availability at the warden,can be presented in closed form.Finally,numerical results validate the effectiveness of our theoretical analysis and also demonstrate the impacts of the factors studied on the system covertness.展开更多
In this work,we consider an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV)-aided covert transmission network,which adopts the uplink transmission of Communication Nodes(CNs)as a cover to facilitate covert transmission to a Primary Comm...In this work,we consider an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV)-aided covert transmission network,which adopts the uplink transmission of Communication Nodes(CNs)as a cover to facilitate covert transmission to a Primary Communication Node(PCN).Specifically,all nodes transmit to the UAV exploiting uplink non-Orthogonal Multiple Access(NOMA),while the UAV performs covert transmission to the PCN at the same frequency.To minimize the average age of covert information,we formulate a joint optimization problem of UAV trajectory and power allocation designing subject to multi-dimensional constraints including covertness demand,communication quality requirement,maximum flying speed,and the maximum available resources.To address this problem,we embed Signomial Programming(SP)into Deep Reinforcement Learning(DRL)and propose a DRL framework capable of handling the constrained Markov decision processes,named SP embedded Soft Actor-Critic(SSAC).By adopting SSAC,we achieve the joint optimization of UAV trajectory and power allocation.Our simulations show the optimized UAV trajectory and verify the superiority of SSAC compared with various existing baseline schemes.The results of this study suggest that by maintaining appropriate distances from both the PCN and CNs,one can effectively enhance the performance of covert communication by reducing the detection probability of the CNs.展开更多
Covert communication guarantees the security of wireless communications via hiding the existence of the transmission.This paper focuses on the first and second order asymptotics of covert communication in the AWGN cha...Covert communication guarantees the security of wireless communications via hiding the existence of the transmission.This paper focuses on the first and second order asymptotics of covert communication in the AWGN channels.The covertness is measured by the total variation distance between the channel output distributions induced with and without the transmission.We provide the exact expressions of the maximum amount of information that can be transmitted with the maximum error probability and the total variation less than any small numbers.The energy detection and the random coding are employed to prove our results.We further compare our results with those under relative entropy.The results show how many additional amounts of information can be transmitted covertly when changing the covertness constraint to total variation.展开更多
With the future substantial increase in coverage and network heterogeneity,emerging networks will encounter unprecedented security threats.Covert communication is considered a potential enhanced security and privacy s...With the future substantial increase in coverage and network heterogeneity,emerging networks will encounter unprecedented security threats.Covert communication is considered a potential enhanced security and privacy solution for safeguarding future wireless networks,as it can enable monitors to detect the transmitter's transmission behavior with a low probability,thereby ensuring the secure transmission of private information.Due to its favorable security,it is foreseeable that covert communication will be widely used in various wireless communication settings such as medical,financial,and military scenarios.However,existing covert communication methods still present many challenges toward practical applications.In particular,it is difficult to guarantee the effectiveness of covert schemes based on the randomness of eavesdropping environments,and it is challenging for legitimate users to detect weak covert signals.Considering that emerging artificial-intelligence-aided transmission technologies can open up entirely new opportunities to address the above challenges,we provide a comprehensive review of recent advances and potential research directions in the field of intelligent covert communications in this work.First,the basic concepts and performance metrics of covert communications are introduced.Then,existing effective covert communication techniques in the time,frequency,spatial,power,and modulation domains are reviewed.Finally,this paper discusses potential implementations and challenges for intelligent covert communications in future networks.展开更多
Dear Editor,Industrial Internet of things(IIoT) is a typical application of cyberphysical system(CPS). In the IIoT, wireless communication is an inevitable trend to replace the deployment-limited wired transmission fo...Dear Editor,Industrial Internet of things(IIoT) is a typical application of cyberphysical system(CPS). In the IIoT, wireless communication is an inevitable trend to replace the deployment-limited wired transmission for cases with large-scale and mobile devices. However, wireless communication gives rise to critical issues related to physical security, such as malicious detections and attacks [1].展开更多
This work employs intelligent reflecting surface(IRS)to enhance secure and covert communication performance.We formulate an optimization problem to jointly design both the reflection beamformer at IRS and transmit pow...This work employs intelligent reflecting surface(IRS)to enhance secure and covert communication performance.We formulate an optimization problem to jointly design both the reflection beamformer at IRS and transmit power at transmitter Alice in order to optimize the achievable secrecy rate at Bob subject to a covertness constraint.We first develop a Dinkelbach-based algorithm to achieve an upper bound performance and a high-quality solution.For reducing the overhead and computational complexity of the Dinkelbach-based scheme,we further conceive a low-complexity algorithm in which analytical expression for the IRS reflection beamforming is derived at each iteration.Examination result shows that the devised low-complexity algorithm is able to achieve similar secrecy rate performance as the Dinkelbach-based algorithm.Our examination also shows that introducing an IRS into the considered system can significantly improve the secure and covert communication performance relative to the scheme without IRS.展开更多
Space/air communications have been envisioned as an essential part of the next-generation mobile communication networks for providing highquality global connectivity. However, the inherent broadcasting nature of wirel...Space/air communications have been envisioned as an essential part of the next-generation mobile communication networks for providing highquality global connectivity. However, the inherent broadcasting nature of wireless propagation environment and the broad coverage pose severe threats to the protection of private data. Emerging covert communications provides a promising solution to achieve robust communication security. Aiming at facilitating the practical implementation of covert communications in space/air networks, we present a tutorial overview of its potentials, scenarios, and key technologies. Specifically, first, the commonly used covertness constraint model, covert performance metrics, and potential application scenarios are briefly introduced. Then, several efficient methods that introduce uncertainty into the covert system are thoroughly summarized, followed by several critical enabling technologies, including joint resource allocation and deployment/trajectory design, multi-antenna and beamforming techniques, reconfigurable intelligent surface(RIS), and artificial intelligence algorithms. Finally, we highlight some open issues for future investigation.展开更多
In this paper,the covert age of information(CAoI),which characterizes the timeliness and covertness performance of communication,is first investigated in the short-packet covert communication with time modulated retro...In this paper,the covert age of information(CAoI),which characterizes the timeliness and covertness performance of communication,is first investigated in the short-packet covert communication with time modulated retrodirective array(TMRDA).Specifically,the TMRDA is designed to maximize the antenna gain in the target direction while the side lobe is sufficiently suppressed.On this basis,the covertness constraint and CAoI are derived in closed form.To facilitate the covert transmission design,the transmit power and block-length are jointly optimized to minimize the CAoI,which demonstrates the trade-off between covertness and timelessness.Our results illustrate that there exists an optimal block-length that yields the minimum CAoI,and the presented optimization results can achieve enhanced performance compared with the fixed block-length case.Additionally,we observe that smaller beam pointing error at Bob leads to improvements in CAoI.展开更多
Intelligent Reflecting Surface(IRS),with the potential capability to reconstruct the electromagnetic propagation environment,evolves a new IRSassisted covert communications paradigm to eliminate the negligible detecti...Intelligent Reflecting Surface(IRS),with the potential capability to reconstruct the electromagnetic propagation environment,evolves a new IRSassisted covert communications paradigm to eliminate the negligible detection of malicious eavesdroppers by coherently beaming the scattered signals and suppressing the signals leakage.However,when multiple IRSs are involved,accurate channel estimation is still a challenge due to the extra hardware complexity and communication overhead.Besides the crossinterference caused by massive reflecting paths,it is hard to obtain the close-formed solution for the optimization of covert communications.On this basis,the paper improves a heterogeneous multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient(MADDPG)approach for the joint active and passive beamforming(Joint A&P BF)optimization without the channel estimation,where the base station(BS)and multiple IRSs are taken as different types of agents and learn to enhance the covert spectrum efficiency(CSE)cooperatively.Thanks to the‘centralized training and distributed execution’feature of MADDPG,each agent can execute the active or passive beamforming independently based on its partial observation without referring to others.Numeral results demonstrate that the proposed deep reinforcement learning(DRL)approach could not only obtain a preferable CSE of legitimate users and a low detection of probability(LPD)of warden,but also alleviate the communication overhead and simplify the IRSs deployment.展开更多
With the gradual popularization of 5G communications,the application of multi-antenna broadcasting technology has become widespread.Therefore,this study aims to investigate the wireless covert communication in the two...With the gradual popularization of 5G communications,the application of multi-antenna broadcasting technology has become widespread.Therefore,this study aims to investigate the wireless covert communication in the two-user cooperative multi-antenna broadcast channel.We focus on the issue that the deteriorated reliability and undetectability are mainly affected by the transmission power.To tackle this issue,we design a scheme based on beamforming to increase the reliability and undetectability of wireless covert communication in the multi-antenna broadcast channel.We first modeled and analyzed the cooperative multi-antenna broadcasting system,and put forward the target question.Then we use the SCA(successive convex approximation)algorithm to transform the target problem into a series of convex subproblems.Then the convex problems are solved and the covert channel capacity is calculated.In order to verify the effectiveness of the scheme,we conducted simulation verification.The simulation results show that the proposed beamforming scheme can effectively improve the reliability and undetectability of covert communication in multi-antenna broadcast channels.展开更多
Covert communication technology makes wireless communication more secure,but it also provides more opportunities for illegal users to transmit harmful information.In order to detect the illegal covert communication of...Covert communication technology makes wireless communication more secure,but it also provides more opportunities for illegal users to transmit harmful information.In order to detect the illegal covert communication of the lawbreakers in real time for subsequent processing,this paper proposes a Gamma approximation-based detection method for multi-antenna covert communication systems.Specifically,the Gamma approximation property is used to calculate the miss detection rate and false alarm rate of the monitor firstly.Then the optimization problem to minimize the sum of the missed detection rate and the false alarm rate is proposed.The optimal detection threshold and the minimum error detection probability are solved according to the properties of the Lambert W function.Finally,simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.展开更多
In this work,we investigate the covert communication in cognitive radio(CR)networks with the existence of multiple cognitive jammers(CJs).Specifically,the secondary transmitter(ST)helps the primary transmitter(PT)to r...In this work,we investigate the covert communication in cognitive radio(CR)networks with the existence of multiple cognitive jammers(CJs).Specifically,the secondary transmitter(ST)helps the primary transmitter(PT)to relay information to primary receiver(PR),as a reward,the ST can use PT's spectrum to transmit private information against the eavesdropper(Eve)under the help of one selected cognitive jammer(CJ).Meanwhile,we propose three jammer-selection schemes,namely,link-oriented jammer selection(LJS),min-max jammer selection(MMJS)and random jammer selection(RJS).For each scheme,we analyze the average covert throughput(ACT)and covert outage probability(COP).Our simulation results show that CJ is helpful to ST's covert communication,the expected minimum detection error probability and ACT can be significantly improved with the increase of false alarm of CJ.Moreover,the LJS scheme achieves best performance in ACT and COP,followed by RJS scheme,and MMJS scheme shows the worst performance.展开更多
The past decades have witnessed a wide application of federated learning in crowd sensing,to handle the numerous data collected by the sensors and provide the users with precise and customized services.Meanwhile,how t...The past decades have witnessed a wide application of federated learning in crowd sensing,to handle the numerous data collected by the sensors and provide the users with precise and customized services.Meanwhile,how to protect the private information of users in federated learning has become an important research topic.Compared with the differential privacy(DP)technique and secure multiparty computation(SMC)strategy,the covert communication mechanism in federated learning is more efficient and energy-saving in training the ma-chine learning models.In this paper,we study the covert communication problem for federated learning in crowd sensing Internet-of-Things networks.Different from the previous works about covert communication in federated learning,most of which are considered in a centralized framework and experimental-based,we firstly proposes a centralized covert communication mechanism for federated learning among n learning agents,the time complexity of which is O(log n),approximating to the optimal solution.Secondly,for the federated learning without parameter server,which is a harder case,we show that solving such a problem is NP-hard and prove the existence of a distributed covert communication mechanism with O(log logΔlog n)times,approximating to the optimal solution.Δis the maximum distance between any pair of learning agents.Theoretical analysis and nu-merical simulations are presented to show the performance of our covert communication mechanisms.We hope that our covert communication work can shed some light on how to protect the privacy of federated learning in crowd sensing from the view of communications.展开更多
In this paper,we study the covert performance of the downlink low earth orbit(LEO)satellite communication,where the unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)is employed as a cooperative jammer.To maximize the covert rate of the LE...In this paper,we study the covert performance of the downlink low earth orbit(LEO)satellite communication,where the unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)is employed as a cooperative jammer.To maximize the covert rate of the LEO satellite transmission,a multi-objective problem is formulated to jointly optimize the UAV’s jamming power and trajectory.For practical consideration,we assume that the UAV can only have partial environmental information,and can’t know the detection threshold and exact location of the eavesdropper on the ground.To solve the multiobjective problem,we propose the data-driven generative adversarial network(DD-GAN)based method to optimize the power and trajectory of the UAV,in which the sample data is collected by using genetic algorithm(GA).Simulation results show that the jamming solution of UAV generated by DD-GAN can achieve an effective trade-off between covert rate and probability of detection errors when only limited prior information is obtained.展开更多
文摘The purpose of the covert communication scheme is to conceal the communication behavior entirely.In such schemes,the sender and receiver rely on secret keys to establish a covert channel.However,conventional key exchange protocols would expose the key exchange process between them.An adversary who observes the key exchange would be aware of the existence of communication behavior.The keys used in covert communication are not suitable to be generated through conventional key exchange schemes.To address this,we propose a blockchain-based covert elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange scheme(BCDH)to conceal the process of the key exchange in blockchain transactions.Following a straightforward setup,BCDH allows the sender and receiver to covertly exchange a secret key on a blockchain without direct communication.Furthermore,we expand the BCDH approach to operate across multiple blockchains,further enhancing its covertness and stability.We analyze BCDH from several perspectives,including covertness,security,randomness,etc.Additionally,we implement a prototype of BCDH on the Ethereum platform to assess its feasibility and performance.Our evaluation demonstrates that BCDH is efficient and well-suited for real-world applications.
基金supported by the CAS Project for Young Scientists in Basic Research under Grant YSBR-035Jiangsu Provincial Key Research and Development Program under Grant BE2021013-2.
文摘In covert communications,joint jammer selection and power optimization are important to improve performance.However,existing schemes usually assume a warden with a known location and perfect Channel State Information(CSI),which is difficult to achieve in practice.To be more practical,it is important to investigate covert communications against a warden with uncertain locations and imperfect CSI,which makes it difficult for legitimate transceivers to estimate the detection probability of the warden.First,the uncertainty caused by the unknown warden location must be removed,and the Optimal Detection Position(OPTDP)of the warden is derived which can provide the best detection performance(i.e.,the worst case for a covert communication).Then,to further avoid the impractical assumption of perfect CSI,the covert throughput is maximized using only the channel distribution information.Given this OPTDP based worst case for covert communications,the jammer selection,the jamming power,the transmission power,and the transmission rate are jointly optimized to maximize the covert throughput(OPTDP-JP).To solve this coupling problem,a Heuristic algorithm based on Maximum Distance Ratio(H-MAXDR)is proposed to provide a sub-optimal solution.First,according to the analysis of the covert throughput,the node with the maximum distance ratio(i.e.,the ratio of the distances from the jammer to the receiver and that to the warden)is selected as the friendly jammer(MAXDR).Then,the optimal transmission and jamming power can be derived,followed by the optimal transmission rate obtained via the bisection method.In numerical and simulation results,it is shown that although the location of the warden is unknown,by assuming the OPTDP of the warden,the proposed OPTDP-JP can always satisfy the covertness constraint.In addition,with an uncertain warden and imperfect CSI,the covert throughput provided by OPTDP-JP is 80%higher than the existing schemes when the covertness constraint is 0.9,showing the effectiveness of OPTDP-JP.
文摘Watermarking is embedding visible or invisible data within media to verify its authenticity or protect copyright.The watermark is embedded in significant spatial or frequency features of the media to make it more resistant to intentional or unintentional modification.Some of these features are important perceptual features according to the human visual system(HVS),which means that the embedded watermark should be imperceptible in these features.Therefore,both the designers of watermarking algorithms and potential attackers must consider these perceptual features when carrying out their actions.The two roles will be considered in this paper when designing a robust watermarking algorithm against the most harmful attacks,like volumetric scaling,histogram equalization,and non-conventional watermarking attacks like the Denoising Convolution Neural Network(DnCNN),which must be considered in watermarking algorithm design due to its rising role in the state-of-the-art attacks.The DnCNN is initialized and trained using watermarked image samples created by our proposed Covert and Severe Attacks Resistant Watermarking Algorithm(CSRWA)to prove its robustness.For this algorithm to satisfy the robustness and imperceptibility tradeoff,implementing the Dither Modulation(DM)algorithm is boosted by utilizing the Just Noticeable Distortion(JND)principle to get an improved performance in this sense.Sensitivity,luminance,inter and intra-block contrast are used to adjust the JND values.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(62161016)the Key Research and Development Project of Lanzhou Jiaotong University(ZDYF2304)the Beijing Engineering Research Center of High-Speed Railway Broadband Mobile Communications(BHRC-2022-1),Beijing Jiaotong University.
文摘This paper investigates the reconfigurable intelligent surface(RIS)-aided MIMO covert communications in high-speed railway(HSR)scenario.In the scenario,RIS controls the phases of reflection elements dynamically to send the signal in the desired direction,which facilitates the covert communication between base station(BS)and train mobile relay(MR)in the existence of a watchful warden(Willie).To protect the desired transmission,it is assumed that MR sends out jamming signals with a varying power to confuse the Willie.Considering the Doppler spread caused by the time-varying wireless channel,the joint optimization problem of the BS beamforming matrix,MR beamforming matrix,and the RIS phase shifts is established to maximize the covert throughput.An alternating optimization(AO)method for handling non convex problems is proposed based on coupling effects and the constraints of constant modulus,and a semidefinite relaxation method is provided.Finally,we achieve the optimal solutions of the multi-objective optimization problem by interior-point method.The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm exhibits the superior robustness and covert performances in high-speed railway scenarios.
基金sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China No.U24B201114,6247070859,62302114 and No.62172353Innovation Fund Program of the Engineering Research Center for Integration and Application of Digital Learning Technology of Ministry of Education No.1331007 and No.1311022Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province No.2024A1515010177.
文摘Blockchain,as a distributed ledger,inherently possesses tamper-resistant capabilities,creating a natural channel for covert communication.However,the immutable nature of data storage might introduce challenges to communication security.This study introduces a blockchain-based covert communication model utilizing dynamic Base-K encoding.The proposed encoding scheme utilizes the input address sequence to determine K to encode the secret message and determines the order of transactions based on K,thus ensuring effective concealment of the message.The dynamic encoding parameters enhance flexibility and address issues related to identical transaction amounts for the same secret message.Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method maintains smooth communication and low susceptibility to tampering,achieving commendable concealment and embedding rates.
基金supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant U2441250 and 62231027in part by Natural Science Basic Research Programof Shaanxi under Grant 2024JC-JCQN-63+2 种基金in part by InnovationCapability Support Program of Shaanxi under Grant2024RS-CXTD-01in part by New Technology Research University Cooperation Project under Grant SKX242010031in part by the FundamentalResearch Funds for the Central Universities and theInnovation Fund of Xidian University under GrantYJSJ25007.
文摘With the widespread application of com-munication technology in the non-terrestrial network(NTN),the issue of the insecure communication due to the inherent openness of the NTN is increasingly being recognized.Consequently,safeguarding com-munication information in the NTN has emerged as a critical challenge.To address this issue,we pro-pose a beamforming and horizontal trajectory joint op-timization method for unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)covert communications in the NTN.First,we formu-late an optimization problem that considers constraints such as the transmitting power and the distance.More-over,we employ the integrated communication and jamming(ICAJ)signal as Alice’s transmitting signal,further protecting the content of communication in-formation.Next,we construct two subproblems,and we propose an alternate optimization(AO)algorithm based on quadratic transform and penalty term method to solve the proposed two subproblems.Simulation re-sults demonstrate that the proposed method is effective and has better performance than benchmarks.
基金supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 62301117,62001094,and U19B2014in part by the National Key Laboratory of Wireless Communications Foundation under Grant 2023KP01602in part by the Natural Science Foundation of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region under Grant 2022D01B184 and 2022D01A297.
文摘In this paper,we investigate covert communications under multi-antenna detection,and explore the impacts of the warden’s channel state information(CSI)availability and the noise uncertainty on system covert capability.The detection performance at warden is analyzed in two cases under the perfect and statistical CSI at warden,respectively.In particular,for the former one,the warden utilizes the likelihood ratio(LR)detector,while for the latter one,the generalized likelihood ratio(GLR)detector is adopted.We first consider the scenario where the blocklength is finite,and demonstrate that the covert rate under both cases asymptotically goes to zero as the blocklength goes to infinity.Subsequently,we take the noise uncertainty at the warden into account which leads to positive covert rate,and characterize the covert rate for infinite blocklength.Specially,we derive the optimal transmit power for the legitimate transmitter that maximizes the covert rate.Besides,the rate gap under two cases,with different CSI availability at the warden,can be presented in closed form.Finally,numerical results validate the effectiveness of our theoretical analysis and also demonstrate the impacts of the factors studied on the system covertness.
基金This study was co-supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.62025110&62271093)the Natural Science Foundation of Chongqing,China(No.CSTB2023NSCQ-LZX0108).
文摘In this work,we consider an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV)-aided covert transmission network,which adopts the uplink transmission of Communication Nodes(CNs)as a cover to facilitate covert transmission to a Primary Communication Node(PCN).Specifically,all nodes transmit to the UAV exploiting uplink non-Orthogonal Multiple Access(NOMA),while the UAV performs covert transmission to the PCN at the same frequency.To minimize the average age of covert information,we formulate a joint optimization problem of UAV trajectory and power allocation designing subject to multi-dimensional constraints including covertness demand,communication quality requirement,maximum flying speed,and the maximum available resources.To address this problem,we embed Signomial Programming(SP)into Deep Reinforcement Learning(DRL)and propose a DRL framework capable of handling the constrained Markov decision processes,named SP embedded Soft Actor-Critic(SSAC).By adopting SSAC,we achieve the joint optimization of UAV trajectory and power allocation.Our simulations show the optimized UAV trajectory and verify the superiority of SSAC compared with various existing baseline schemes.The results of this study suggest that by maintaining appropriate distances from both the PCN and CNs,one can effectively enhance the performance of covert communication by reducing the detection probability of the CNs.
基金supported in part by the Natural Science Foundation of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region under Grant 2022D01B184the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 62301117,62131005.
文摘Covert communication guarantees the security of wireless communications via hiding the existence of the transmission.This paper focuses on the first and second order asymptotics of covert communication in the AWGN channels.The covertness is measured by the total variation distance between the channel output distributions induced with and without the transmission.We provide the exact expressions of the maximum amount of information that can be transmitted with the maximum error probability and the total variation less than any small numbers.The energy detection and the random coding are employed to prove our results.We further compare our results with those under relative entropy.The results show how many additional amounts of information can be transmitted covertly when changing the covertness constraint to total variation.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(62425103)the National Key Research and Development Program of China(2022YFC3301300)。
文摘With the future substantial increase in coverage and network heterogeneity,emerging networks will encounter unprecedented security threats.Covert communication is considered a potential enhanced security and privacy solution for safeguarding future wireless networks,as it can enable monitors to detect the transmitter's transmission behavior with a low probability,thereby ensuring the secure transmission of private information.Due to its favorable security,it is foreseeable that covert communication will be widely used in various wireless communication settings such as medical,financial,and military scenarios.However,existing covert communication methods still present many challenges toward practical applications.In particular,it is difficult to guarantee the effectiveness of covert schemes based on the randomness of eavesdropping environments,and it is challenging for legitimate users to detect weak covert signals.Considering that emerging artificial-intelligence-aided transmission technologies can open up entirely new opportunities to address the above challenges,we provide a comprehensive review of recent advances and potential research directions in the field of intelligent covert communications in this work.First,the basic concepts and performance metrics of covert communications are introduced.Then,existing effective covert communication techniques in the time,frequency,spatial,power,and modulation domains are reviewed.Finally,this paper discusses potential implementations and challenges for intelligent covert communications in future networks.
基金partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(62273298,62273295)Hebei Natural Science Foundation(F2023203063,F2022203025)+1 种基金China Scholarship Council(CSC)(202308130180)Provincial Key Laboratory Performance Subsidy Project(22567612H)
文摘Dear Editor,Industrial Internet of things(IIoT) is a typical application of cyberphysical system(CPS). In the IIoT, wireless communication is an inevitable trend to replace the deployment-limited wired transmission for cases with large-scale and mobile devices. However, wireless communication gives rise to critical issues related to physical security, such as malicious detections and attacks [1].
基金supported in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 62371004 and Grant 62301005in part by the University Synergy Innovation Program of Anhui Province under Grant GXXT-2022-055+1 种基金in part by the Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province under Grant 2308085QF197in part by the Natural Science Research Project of Education Department of Anhui Province of China under Grant 2023AH051031。
文摘This work employs intelligent reflecting surface(IRS)to enhance secure and covert communication performance.We formulate an optimization problem to jointly design both the reflection beamformer at IRS and transmit power at transmitter Alice in order to optimize the achievable secrecy rate at Bob subject to a covertness constraint.We first develop a Dinkelbach-based algorithm to achieve an upper bound performance and a high-quality solution.For reducing the overhead and computational complexity of the Dinkelbach-based scheme,we further conceive a low-complexity algorithm in which analytical expression for the IRS reflection beamforming is derived at each iteration.Examination result shows that the devised low-complexity algorithm is able to achieve similar secrecy rate performance as the Dinkelbach-based algorithm.Our examination also shows that introducing an IRS into the considered system can significantly improve the secure and covert communication performance relative to the scheme without IRS.
基金supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(NSFC)under grant numbers U22A2007 and 62171010the Beijing Natural Science Foundation under grant number L212003.
文摘Space/air communications have been envisioned as an essential part of the next-generation mobile communication networks for providing highquality global connectivity. However, the inherent broadcasting nature of wireless propagation environment and the broad coverage pose severe threats to the protection of private data. Emerging covert communications provides a promising solution to achieve robust communication security. Aiming at facilitating the practical implementation of covert communications in space/air networks, we present a tutorial overview of its potentials, scenarios, and key technologies. Specifically, first, the commonly used covertness constraint model, covert performance metrics, and potential application scenarios are briefly introduced. Then, several efficient methods that introduce uncertainty into the covert system are thoroughly summarized, followed by several critical enabling technologies, including joint resource allocation and deployment/trajectory design, multi-antenna and beamforming techniques, reconfigurable intelligent surface(RIS), and artificial intelligence algorithms. Finally, we highlight some open issues for future investigation.
文摘In this paper,the covert age of information(CAoI),which characterizes the timeliness and covertness performance of communication,is first investigated in the short-packet covert communication with time modulated retrodirective array(TMRDA).Specifically,the TMRDA is designed to maximize the antenna gain in the target direction while the side lobe is sufficiently suppressed.On this basis,the covertness constraint and CAoI are derived in closed form.To facilitate the covert transmission design,the transmit power and block-length are jointly optimized to minimize the CAoI,which demonstrates the trade-off between covertness and timelessness.Our results illustrate that there exists an optimal block-length that yields the minimum CAoI,and the presented optimization results can achieve enhanced performance compared with the fixed block-length case.Additionally,we observe that smaller beam pointing error at Bob leads to improvements in CAoI.
基金supported by the Key Laboratory of Near Ground Detection and Perception Technology(No.6142414220406 and 6142414210101)Shaanxi and Taicang Keypoint Research and Invention Program(No.2021GXLH-01-15 and TC2019SF03)。
文摘Intelligent Reflecting Surface(IRS),with the potential capability to reconstruct the electromagnetic propagation environment,evolves a new IRSassisted covert communications paradigm to eliminate the negligible detection of malicious eavesdroppers by coherently beaming the scattered signals and suppressing the signals leakage.However,when multiple IRSs are involved,accurate channel estimation is still a challenge due to the extra hardware complexity and communication overhead.Besides the crossinterference caused by massive reflecting paths,it is hard to obtain the close-formed solution for the optimization of covert communications.On this basis,the paper improves a heterogeneous multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient(MADDPG)approach for the joint active and passive beamforming(Joint A&P BF)optimization without the channel estimation,where the base station(BS)and multiple IRSs are taken as different types of agents and learn to enhance the covert spectrum efficiency(CSE)cooperatively.Thanks to the‘centralized training and distributed execution’feature of MADDPG,each agent can execute the active or passive beamforming independently based on its partial observation without referring to others.Numeral results demonstrate that the proposed deep reinforcement learning(DRL)approach could not only obtain a preferable CSE of legitimate users and a low detection of probability(LPD)of warden,but also alleviate the communication overhead and simplify the IRSs deployment.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grants No.U1836104,61772281,61702235,61801073,61931004,62072250).
文摘With the gradual popularization of 5G communications,the application of multi-antenna broadcasting technology has become widespread.Therefore,this study aims to investigate the wireless covert communication in the two-user cooperative multi-antenna broadcast channel.We focus on the issue that the deteriorated reliability and undetectability are mainly affected by the transmission power.To tackle this issue,we design a scheme based on beamforming to increase the reliability and undetectability of wireless covert communication in the multi-antenna broadcast channel.We first modeled and analyzed the cooperative multi-antenna broadcasting system,and put forward the target question.Then we use the SCA(successive convex approximation)algorithm to transform the target problem into a series of convex subproblems.Then the convex problems are solved and the covert channel capacity is calculated.In order to verify the effectiveness of the scheme,we conducted simulation verification.The simulation results show that the proposed beamforming scheme can effectively improve the reliability and undetectability of covert communication in multi-antenna broadcast channels.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(NSFC)(Grant No.62101441)Young Talent fund of University Association for Science and Technology in Shaanxi,China(Grant No.20210111)+4 种基金National Key Research and Development Program of China(Grant No.2021YFC2203503)the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities(Grant No.QTZX23065)the Key Research and Development Program of Shaanxi in Industrial Domain(Grant No.2021GY-103)the National Key Laboratory Foundation 2022-JCJQ-LB-006(Grant No.6142411222203)the graduate innovation fund of Xi’an University of Posts and Electrical University(Grand No.CXJJZL2023002)。
文摘Covert communication technology makes wireless communication more secure,but it also provides more opportunities for illegal users to transmit harmful information.In order to detect the illegal covert communication of the lawbreakers in real time for subsequent processing,this paper proposes a Gamma approximation-based detection method for multi-antenna covert communication systems.Specifically,the Gamma approximation property is used to calculate the miss detection rate and false alarm rate of the monitor firstly.Then the optimization problem to minimize the sum of the missed detection rate and the false alarm rate is proposed.The optimal detection threshold and the minimum error detection probability are solved according to the properties of the Lambert W function.Finally,simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
基金supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.61941105,No.61901327 and No.62101450)in part by the National Natural Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholar(No.61825104)+1 种基金in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities(JB210109)in part by the Foundation of State Key Laboratory of Integrated Services Networks of Xidian University(ISN22-03)。
文摘In this work,we investigate the covert communication in cognitive radio(CR)networks with the existence of multiple cognitive jammers(CJs).Specifically,the secondary transmitter(ST)helps the primary transmitter(PT)to relay information to primary receiver(PR),as a reward,the ST can use PT's spectrum to transmit private information against the eavesdropper(Eve)under the help of one selected cognitive jammer(CJ).Meanwhile,we propose three jammer-selection schemes,namely,link-oriented jammer selection(LJS),min-max jammer selection(MMJS)and random jammer selection(RJS).For each scheme,we analyze the average covert throughput(ACT)and covert outage probability(COP).Our simulation results show that CJ is helpful to ST's covert communication,the expected minimum detection error probability and ACT can be significantly improved with the increase of false alarm of CJ.Moreover,the LJS scheme achieves best performance in ACT and COP,followed by RJS scheme,and MMJS scheme shows the worst performance.
基金supported in part by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2020YFB1005900the National Natural Science Foundation of China(NSFC)under Grant 62102232,62122042,61971269Natural Science Foundation of Shandong province under Grant ZR2021QF064.
文摘The past decades have witnessed a wide application of federated learning in crowd sensing,to handle the numerous data collected by the sensors and provide the users with precise and customized services.Meanwhile,how to protect the private information of users in federated learning has become an important research topic.Compared with the differential privacy(DP)technique and secure multiparty computation(SMC)strategy,the covert communication mechanism in federated learning is more efficient and energy-saving in training the ma-chine learning models.In this paper,we study the covert communication problem for federated learning in crowd sensing Internet-of-Things networks.Different from the previous works about covert communication in federated learning,most of which are considered in a centralized framework and experimental-based,we firstly proposes a centralized covert communication mechanism for federated learning among n learning agents,the time complexity of which is O(log n),approximating to the optimal solution.Secondly,for the federated learning without parameter server,which is a harder case,we show that solving such a problem is NP-hard and prove the existence of a distributed covert communication mechanism with O(log logΔlog n)times,approximating to the optimal solution.Δis the maximum distance between any pair of learning agents.Theoretical analysis and nu-merical simulations are presented to show the performance of our covert communication mechanisms.We hope that our covert communication work can shed some light on how to protect the privacy of federated learning in crowd sensing from the view of communications.
基金supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholar 61825104in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 62201582+4 种基金in part by the National Nature Science Foundation of China under Grants 62101450in part by the Key R&D Plan of Shaan Xi Province Grants 2023YBGY037in part by National Key R&D Program of China(2022YFC3301300)in part by the Natural Science Basic Research Program of Shaanxi under Grant 2022JQ-632in part by Innovative Cultivation Project of School of Information and Communication of National University of Defense Technology under Grant YJKT-ZD-2202。
文摘In this paper,we study the covert performance of the downlink low earth orbit(LEO)satellite communication,where the unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)is employed as a cooperative jammer.To maximize the covert rate of the LEO satellite transmission,a multi-objective problem is formulated to jointly optimize the UAV’s jamming power and trajectory.For practical consideration,we assume that the UAV can only have partial environmental information,and can’t know the detection threshold and exact location of the eavesdropper on the ground.To solve the multiobjective problem,we propose the data-driven generative adversarial network(DD-GAN)based method to optimize the power and trajectory of the UAV,in which the sample data is collected by using genetic algorithm(GA).Simulation results show that the jamming solution of UAV generated by DD-GAN can achieve an effective trade-off between covert rate and probability of detection errors when only limited prior information is obtained.
