Covert Communications on Renewal Packet Channels
Ramin Soltani, Dennis Goeckel, Don Towsley, Amir Houmansadr

TL;DR
This paper extends the theory of covert communications to renewal packet channels, demonstrating limits on packet insertion and timing-based information transfer under different authentication scenarios.
Contribution
It introduces the information-theoretic limits for covert communication over renewal process-based packet channels, expanding beyond Poisson models to more general timing processes.
Findings
Alice can covertly insert O(√N) packets without detection.
Alice can reliably transmit O(N) bits using timing modifications.
The results apply to channels with non-Poisson renewal processes.
Abstract
Security and privacy are major concerns in modern communication networks. In recent years, the information theory of covert communications, where the very presence of the communication is undetectable to a watchful and determined adversary, has been of great interest. This emerging body of work has focused on additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), discrete memoryless channels (DMCs), and optical channels. In contrast, our recent work introduced the information-theoretic limits for covert communications over packet channels whose packet timings are governed by a Poisson point process. However, actual network packet arrival times do not generally conform to the Poisson process assumption, and thus here we consider the extension of our work to timing channels characterized by more general renewal processes of rate . We consider two scenarios. In the first scenario, the source of…
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