A well-designed Physical-Layer Authentication(PLA)scheme should consider three properties:covertness,robustness,and security.However,the three properties always cause some dilemmas,e.g.,higher covertness leading to lo...A well-designed Physical-Layer Authentication(PLA)scheme should consider three properties:covertness,robustness,and security.However,the three properties always cause some dilemmas,e.g.,higher covertness leading to lower robustness.This paper concerns the problem of improving the covertness without sacrificing the robustness.This problem is important because of the following reasons:reducing the errors in recovered source message,improving the security,and ease of constructing a multi-factor authentication system.In this paper,we propose three covert PLA schemes to address the problem.In the first scheme,we improve the covertness by reducing the modification ratio on the source message based on an encoding mechanism.In the second scheme,we improve the covertness by optimizing the superimposing angle,which maximizes the minimum distance between the tagged symbols and the boundary line of the demodulation decision for the source message.In the third scheme,referred to as the hybrid scheme,we further improve the covertness by jointly using the advantages of both the above two schemes.Our experimental results show that when the SNR at a legitimate receiver is 25 dB,as compared with the prior scheme,the first scheme improves the covertness by 17:74%,the second scheme improves the covertness by 28:79%,and the third scheme improves the covertness by 32:09%,while they have similar robustness as Received:Aug.07,2020 Revised:Sep.08,2020 Editor:Nanrun Zhou that of the prior scheme.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
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
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
The utilization of unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV) relays in cooperative communication has gained considerable attention in recent years.However,the current research is mostly based on fixed base stations and users,lacki...The utilization of unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV) relays in cooperative communication has gained considerable attention in recent years.However,the current research is mostly based on fixed base stations and users,lacking sufficient exploration of scenarios where communication nodes are in motion.This paper presents a multi-destination vehicle communication system based on decode-and-forward(DF)UAV relays,where source and destination vehicles are moving and an internal eavesdropper intercepts messages from UAV.The closed-form expressions for system outage probability and secrecy outage probability are derived to analyze the reliability and security of the system.Furthermore,the impact of the UAV's position,signal transmission power,and system time allocation ratio on the system's performance are also analyzed.The numerical simulation results validate the accuracy of the derived formulas and confirm the correctness of the analysis.The appropriate time allocation ratio significantly enhances the security performance of system under various environmental conditions.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
Fish cell line provide a useful tool for studies in virology and molecular biology.To establish a novel continuous marine fish cell line(EFF)from caudal fin tissue of brown-marbled grouper Epinephelus fuscoguttatus,it...Fish cell line provide a useful tool for studies in virology and molecular biology.To establish a novel continuous marine fish cell line(EFF)from caudal fin tissue of brown-marbled grouper Epinephelus fuscoguttatus,its susceptibility to the crustacean covert mortality nodavirus(CMNV)was evaluated.The primary cell cultures were initiated first by incomplete digestion of fin tissue blocks with dispase and collagenase,and then the explant was cultured in L-15 medium supplemented with 20%fetal bovine serum,10%grouper muscle extract,and 20-ng/mL growth factors of basic fibroblast growth factor(bFGF)and epidermal growth factor(EGF).The EFF cells were continuously passaged beyond 50 times in fibroblast-like morphology,and they grew well in L-15 medium supplemented with a lower concentration fetal bovine serum(10%)at 28℃ after passage 10,without muscle extract and the growth factors.In addition,their grouper origin was confirmed by chromosome analysis and cytochrome oxidase 1(CO 1)gene analysis of these EFF cells.Transfection experiment via lipofectamine 8000 indicated that the EFF cells had a high transfection potential with a transfection efficiency up to 32%.Cross-species viral susceptibility analysis showed that CMNV not only successfully infected the EFF cells as evidenced by obvious cytopathic effects like vacuolation,detachment and death of cells,but also multiplied in the EFF cells as indicated by the results of semi-quantitative RT-PCR in transmission electron microscopy.Therefore,the establishment of immortal EFF cell line provided a useful cell model for future works on the isolation,multiplication,and pathogenic mechanism of cross-species infection of CMNV as well as genetic manipulation.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
BACKGROUND Restrictive practices(RPs)are defined by measures linked to physical and chemical restraints to reduce the movement or control behaviours during any emergency.Seclusion is an equal part of RPs intended to i...BACKGROUND Restrictive practices(RPs)are defined by measures linked to physical and chemical restraints to reduce the movement or control behaviours during any emergency.Seclusion is an equal part of RPs intended to isolate and reduce the sensory stimulation to safeguard the patient and those within the vicinity.Using interventions by way of virtual reality(VR)could assist with reducing the need for RPs as it could help reduce anxiety or agitation by way of placing users into realistic and immersive environments.This could also aid staff to and change current RPs.AIM To assess the feasibility and effectiveness of using a VR platform to provide reduction in RP training.METHODS A randomised controlled feasibility study,accompanied by evaluations at 1 month and 6 months,was conducted within inpatient psychiatric wards at Southern Health National Health Service Foundation Trust,United Kingdom.Virti VR scenarios were used on VR headsets to provide training on reducing RPs in 3 inpatient psychiatric wards.Outcome measures included general self-efficacy scale,generalised anxiety disorder assessment 7(GAD-7),Burnout Assessment Tool 12,the Everyday Discrimination Scale,and the Compassionate Engagement and Action Scale.RESULTS Findings revealed statistically significant differences between the VR and treatment as usual groups,in the Everyday Discrimination Scale items Q8 and Q9:P=0.023 and P=0.040 respectively,indicating higher levels of perceived discrimination in the VR group.There were no significant differences between groups in terms of general self-efficacy,generalised anxiety disorder assessment 9,and Burnout Assessment Tool 12 scores.A significant difference was observed within the VR group for compassionate engagement from others(P=0.005)over time.Most respondents recorded System Usability Scale scores above 70,with an average score of 71.79.There was a significant reduction in rates of RPs in the VR group vs treatment as usual group with a fluctuating variability observed in the VR group likely due to external factors not captured in the study.CONCLUSION Ongoing advancement of VR technology enables the possibility of creating scenarios and simulations tailored to healthcare environments that empower staff by providing more comprehensive and effective training for handling situations.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
The rapid development of the internet and digital media has provided convenience while also posing a potential risk of steganography abuse.Identifying steganographer is essential in tracing secret information origins ...The rapid development of the internet and digital media has provided convenience while also posing a potential risk of steganography abuse.Identifying steganographer is essential in tracing secret information origins and preventing illicit covert communication online.Accurately discerning a steganographer from many normal users is challenging due to various factors,such as the complexity in obtaining the steganography algorithm,extracting highly separability features,and modeling the cover data.After extensive exploration,several methods have been proposed for steganographer identification.This paper presents a survey of existing studies.Firstly,we provide a concise introduction to the research background and outline the issue of steganographer identification.Secondly,we present fundamental concepts and techniques that establish a general framework for identifying steganographers.Within this framework,state-of-the-art methods are summarized from five key aspects:data acquisition,feature extraction,feature optimization,identification paradigm,and performance evaluation.Furthermore,theoretical and experimental analyses examine the advantages and limitations of these existing methods.Finally,the survey highlights outstanding issues in image steganographer identification that deserve further research.展开更多
基金partially supported by Natural Science Foundations of China(No.61972262)National Key R&D Project of China(No.2020YFB1805404)+2 种基金Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong,China(No.2016A030313046)Fundamental Research Programs of Shenzhen City(No.JCYJ20180305124648757)China Scholarship Council(No.201908440031).
文摘A well-designed Physical-Layer Authentication(PLA)scheme should consider three properties:covertness,robustness,and security.However,the three properties always cause some dilemmas,e.g.,higher covertness leading to lower robustness.This paper concerns the problem of improving the covertness without sacrificing the robustness.This problem is important because of the following reasons:reducing the errors in recovered source message,improving the security,and ease of constructing a multi-factor authentication system.In this paper,we propose three covert PLA schemes to address the problem.In the first scheme,we improve the covertness by reducing the modification ratio on the source message based on an encoding mechanism.In the second scheme,we improve the covertness by optimizing the superimposing angle,which maximizes the minimum distance between the tagged symbols and the boundary line of the demodulation decision for the source message.In the third scheme,referred to as the hybrid scheme,we further improve the covertness by jointly using the advantages of both the above two schemes.Our experimental results show that when the SNR at a legitimate receiver is 25 dB,as compared with the prior scheme,the first scheme improves the covertness by 17:74%,the second scheme improves the covertness by 28:79%,and the third scheme improves the covertness by 32:09%,while they have similar robustness as Received:Aug.07,2020 Revised:Sep.08,2020 Editor:Nanrun Zhou that of the prior scheme.
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.
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 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 by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 62001359 and 61901201by the Key Science and Technology Research Project of Henan Province under Grants 232102211059the Natural Science Basic Research Program of Shaanxi under Grants 2022JQ-658 and 2022JQ-621。
文摘The utilization of unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV) relays in cooperative communication has gained considerable attention in recent years.However,the current research is mostly based on fixed base stations and users,lacking sufficient exploration of scenarios where communication nodes are in motion.This paper presents a multi-destination vehicle communication system based on decode-and-forward(DF)UAV relays,where source and destination vehicles are moving and an internal eavesdropper intercepts messages from UAV.The closed-form expressions for system outage probability and secrecy outage probability are derived to analyze the reliability and security of the system.Furthermore,the impact of the UAV's position,signal transmission power,and system time allocation ratio on the system's performance are also analyzed.The numerical simulation results validate the accuracy of the derived formulas and confirm the correctness of the analysis.The appropriate time allocation ratio significantly enhances the security performance of system under various environmental conditions.
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 by the Key Research&Development Program of Shandong Province(No.2023 CXGC 010710)the National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.32273116)the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities(No.202261023)。
文摘Fish cell line provide a useful tool for studies in virology and molecular biology.To establish a novel continuous marine fish cell line(EFF)from caudal fin tissue of brown-marbled grouper Epinephelus fuscoguttatus,its susceptibility to the crustacean covert mortality nodavirus(CMNV)was evaluated.The primary cell cultures were initiated first by incomplete digestion of fin tissue blocks with dispase and collagenase,and then the explant was cultured in L-15 medium supplemented with 20%fetal bovine serum,10%grouper muscle extract,and 20-ng/mL growth factors of basic fibroblast growth factor(bFGF)and epidermal growth factor(EGF).The EFF cells were continuously passaged beyond 50 times in fibroblast-like morphology,and they grew well in L-15 medium supplemented with a lower concentration fetal bovine serum(10%)at 28℃ after passage 10,without muscle extract and the growth factors.In addition,their grouper origin was confirmed by chromosome analysis and cytochrome oxidase 1(CO 1)gene analysis of these EFF cells.Transfection experiment via lipofectamine 8000 indicated that the EFF cells had a high transfection potential with a transfection efficiency up to 32%.Cross-species viral susceptibility analysis showed that CMNV not only successfully infected the EFF cells as evidenced by obvious cytopathic effects like vacuolation,detachment and death of cells,but also multiplied in the EFF cells as indicated by the results of semi-quantitative RT-PCR in transmission electron microscopy.Therefore,the establishment of immortal EFF cell line provided a useful cell model for future works on the isolation,multiplication,and pathogenic mechanism of cross-species infection of CMNV as well as genetic manipulation.
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BACKGROUND Restrictive practices(RPs)are defined by measures linked to physical and chemical restraints to reduce the movement or control behaviours during any emergency.Seclusion is an equal part of RPs intended to isolate and reduce the sensory stimulation to safeguard the patient and those within the vicinity.Using interventions by way of virtual reality(VR)could assist with reducing the need for RPs as it could help reduce anxiety or agitation by way of placing users into realistic and immersive environments.This could also aid staff to and change current RPs.AIM To assess the feasibility and effectiveness of using a VR platform to provide reduction in RP training.METHODS A randomised controlled feasibility study,accompanied by evaluations at 1 month and 6 months,was conducted within inpatient psychiatric wards at Southern Health National Health Service Foundation Trust,United Kingdom.Virti VR scenarios were used on VR headsets to provide training on reducing RPs in 3 inpatient psychiatric wards.Outcome measures included general self-efficacy scale,generalised anxiety disorder assessment 7(GAD-7),Burnout Assessment Tool 12,the Everyday Discrimination Scale,and the Compassionate Engagement and Action Scale.RESULTS Findings revealed statistically significant differences between the VR and treatment as usual groups,in the Everyday Discrimination Scale items Q8 and Q9:P=0.023 and P=0.040 respectively,indicating higher levels of perceived discrimination in the VR group.There were no significant differences between groups in terms of general self-efficacy,generalised anxiety disorder assessment 9,and Burnout Assessment Tool 12 scores.A significant difference was observed within the VR group for compassionate engagement from others(P=0.005)over time.Most respondents recorded System Usability Scale scores above 70,with an average score of 71.79.There was a significant reduction in rates of RPs in the VR group vs treatment as usual group with a fluctuating variability observed in the VR group likely due to external factors not captured in the study.CONCLUSION Ongoing advancement of VR technology enables the possibility of creating scenarios and simulations tailored to healthcare environments that empower staff by providing more comprehensive and effective training for handling situations.
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 Key Research and Development Program of China(No.2022YFB3102900)the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Nos.62172435,62202495 and 62002103)+2 种基金Zhongyuan Science and Technology Innovation Leading Talent Project of China(No.214200510019)Key Research and Development Project of Henan Province(No.2211321200)the Natural Science Foundation of Henan Province(No.222300420058).
文摘The rapid development of the internet and digital media has provided convenience while also posing a potential risk of steganography abuse.Identifying steganographer is essential in tracing secret information origins and preventing illicit covert communication online.Accurately discerning a steganographer from many normal users is challenging due to various factors,such as the complexity in obtaining the steganography algorithm,extracting highly separability features,and modeling the cover data.After extensive exploration,several methods have been proposed for steganographer identification.This paper presents a survey of existing studies.Firstly,we provide a concise introduction to the research background and outline the issue of steganographer identification.Secondly,we present fundamental concepts and techniques that establish a general framework for identifying steganographers.Within this framework,state-of-the-art methods are summarized from five key aspects:data acquisition,feature extraction,feature optimization,identification paradigm,and performance evaluation.Furthermore,theoretical and experimental analyses examine the advantages and limitations of these existing methods.Finally,the survey highlights outstanding issues in image steganographer identification that deserve further research.
