Covert Communication With Polynomial Computational Complexity

This paper develops a concatenated coding scheme with polynomial computational complexity for covert communication over Binary Symmetric Channels (BSCs) and binary-input Discrete Memoryless Channels (DMCs). Our setting is as follows — a transmitter Alice wishes to potentially reliably transmit a message to a receiver Bob, while ensuring that the transmission taking place is covert with respect to a warden Willie (who hears Alice’s transmission over another independent channel). Prior works showed that Alice can reliably and covertly transmit <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathcal {O}(\sqrt {{n}})$ </tex-math></inline-formula> message bits over <italic>n</italic> channel uses, but one drawback is that the computational complexity of the codes designed scales as <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2^{\Theta (\sqrt {{n}})}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. In this work we provide a capacity-achiveing coding scheme with provable guarantees on both reliability and covertness, and its computational complexity grows polynomially in the blocklength <italic>n</italic>.

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