Poster Session 4, 2:15 PM - 3:00 PM: Campus Center Auditorium [A18]

Presenter: Lucas Alexander Crawshaw

Faculty Sponsor: Dennis Goeckel

School: UMass Amherst

Research Area: Electrical and Computer Engineering

ABSTRACT

In modern communications systems, the prevalence of pervasive wireless communications creates a growing need for privacy, hence motivating covert transmission where messages are exchanged without detection by an adversarial observer. Prior work has demonstrated that a positive rate of covert communication is achievable through the presence of an uninformed jammer; however, the channel conditions required to enable such transmission are often described in abstract and unintuitive terms. This work proposes a simplified and easily identifiable characterization of the class of distributions for the random jamming that permit positive-rate covert communication. Analytical derivations and simulation-based experiments are conducted on commonly used distributions in wireless communication to examine their defining statistical properties and their influence on covert performance. The results reveal a strong relationship between the shape of a channel distribution in correlation to its concavity, which directly impacts the effectiveness of covert transmission. These findings provide a practical method for determining whether covert communication is achievable based solely on the jammer to adversary channel distribution, offering a clearer and more accessible criterion for covert system design.