# Information-Theoretic Security or Covert Communication

## TL;DR

This paper compares information-theoretic secrecy and covert communication, analyzing their similarities and differences through a unified framework, and explores power optimization strategies for both scenarios.

## Contribution

It introduces a common mathematical framework for secrecy and covert communication, enabling the use of similar optimization tools and addressing practical power constraints.

## Key findings

- Unified framework for secrecy and covert communication
- Power optimization strategies tailored for each scenario
- Insights into the similarities and differences between the two security paradigms

## Abstract

Information-theoretic secrecy, in particular the wiretap channel formulation, provides protection against interception of a message by adversary Eve and has been widely studied in the last two decades. In contrast, covert communications under an analogous formulation provides protection against even the detection of the presence of the message by an adversary, and it has drawn significant interest recently. These two security topics are generally applicable in different scenarios; however, here we explore what can be learned by studying them under a common framework. Under a similar but not identical mathematical formulation, we introduce power optimization problems for each of the secrecy and the covert communications scenario, and we exploit common aspects of the problems to employ similar tools in their respective optimizations. Moreover, due to the practical limitations, we assume only channel