Information-Theoretic Security or Covert Communication
This work addresses security challenges in wireless communication by providing a unified approach for scenarios requiring protection against message interception or detection, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing formulations.
The paper tackles the problem of optimizing power allocation for both information-theoretic secrecy and covert communications under a common framework, showing that similar mathematical tools can be applied to both scenarios despite their differences.
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