Researchers at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, led by Ji He, have been exploring ways to enhance covert communications in the energy sector, particularly in the context of smart grids and other energy infrastructure that rely on secure data transmission. Their work focuses on improving the ability to transmit information discreetly while evading detection by surveillance systems.
The study investigates a method called PASS-enabled downlink covert communication, which involves using a dual-waveguide architecture to simultaneously deliver covert information and randomized jamming signals. This approach aims to hide the transmission footprint, making it difficult for wardens—entities performing signal detection—to identify the communication. The researchers considered three types of power-radiation laws: general, proportional, and equal, to understand how different radiation patterns affect the system’s detectability.
To assess the system’s performance, the researchers derived closed-form expressions for local false-alarm and miss-detection probabilities. They also developed a framework using probability-generating functions and elementary-symmetric polynomials to characterize the system-level detection error probability under non-independent and identically distributed majority-voting fusion. This framework helps in understanding how multiple wardens, each making local decisions, can collectively detect covert communications.
Building on this analytical framework, the researchers formulated a robust optimization problem to maximize the average covert rate while ensuring that the communication remains covert. To solve this nonconvex design problem, they developed an algorithm called MM-BCD-SCA, which produces tractable alternating updates for power/radiation variables and PA positions via convex surrogates and inner approximations of the detection error probability value function.
Numerical results validated the theoretical analysis and demonstrated the impact of cooperative monitoring and PASS radiation laws on the covertness-rate tradeoff. This research highlights the importance of understanding and mitigating the risks associated with covert communications in the energy sector, particularly in scenarios where secure and undetectable data transmission is crucial for the integrity and security of energy infrastructure.
The research was published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, a peer-reviewed journal that focuses on the security and forensics of information systems.
This article is based on research available at arXiv.